Literary theory Books
The University of Chicago Press Academic Postmodern the Rule of Literature A
Book SynopsisThis critique of the postmodern turn discusses the distinctive aspects of postmodern scholarship: the pervasiveness of the literary and the flight from grand theory to local knowledge. Defining features of postmodern thought are also discussed here such as storytelling and localism.
£24.00
The University of Chicago Press Poetic Closure
Book SynopsisExplores the question: How do poems end? This work examines numerous individual poems and examples of common poetic forms in order to reveal the relationship between closure and the overall structure and integrity of a poem.Trade Review"Ranging from Elizabethan lyric through free and syllabic verse and concrete poetry, Poetic Closure is a learned, witty, and richly illustrated study of the behavior of poems.... It can be read, enjoyed, studied by people who like reading poetry, including - I would suspect - poets." - Richard M. Elman, New York Times Book Review"
£30.00
The University of Chicago Press Largesse Paper Parti Pris Reunion Des Musees
Book SynopsisIn his exhibition and accompanying essay for the Taking Sides programme at the Louvre, Jean Starobinski explores the theme of largesse in its broadest sense.
£47.50
The University of Chicago Press Selected Writings of an EighteenthCentury
Book SynopsisThis volume brings together Caminer's letters, poems and journalistic writings, providing an intellectual biography of this remarkable woman, as well as a glimpse into her intimate correspondence.
£28.00
The University of Chicago Press The Lost Second Book of Aristotles Poetics
Book Synopsis
£76.00
Palgrave Macmillan Tolkien Race and Cultural History From Fairies to
Book SynopsisFimi explores the evolution of Tolkien's mythology throughout his lifetime by examining how it changed as a result of his life story and contemporary cultural and intellectual history. This new approach and scope brings to light neglected aspects of Tolkien's imaginative vision and contextualises his fiction.Trade ReviewWinner ofthe Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies 2010 Short listed for the Katharine Briggs Award 2009 'Dimitra Fimi's Tolkien, Race and Cultural History traces the evolution of the legendarium with admirable care...This scholarly yet approachable book is filled with...surprising fragments.' - Jon Barnes, Times Literary Supplement 'Fimi's book reads so well that it's hard to believe that it's an academic tome' - Henry Gee, Mallorn 'constitutes an important contribution to Tolkien studies...the author brings together (often for the first time) relevant research from cultural history and lays out her arguments fair and square...Fimi's book has given us some answers but has also opened up some avenues for future research. What more can we ask for?' Thomas Honegger, Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat, Germany '...a rich study into Tolkien's creative impulses and the influences that worked on those impulses in the course of a long creative life...any reader interested in the work of J. R. R. Tolkien...is in for a treat. The book is intelligently argued and full of interesting ideas and approaches, offering fresh insights into Tolkien's authorship...you will find plenty of stimulating and thought-provoking material to make the book well worth reading.' - Nils-Lennart Johannesson, English Today 'Until now, Tolkien has generally been studied in isolation, or as the father of modern fantasy-writing, but this book shows how his work was rooted in the mental world of his contemporaries and the immediately preceding generation. As Tolkien scholarship becomes more analytical, Fimi's study provides essential new insights.' - Jacqueline Simpson, The Folklore SocietyTable of ContentsList of Figures Conventions and Abbreviations Introduction PART I: HOW IT ALL BEGAN In the Beginning were the Fairies... 'Fluttering Sprites with Antennae': Victorian and Edwardian Fancies The Fairies, Faith and Folklore PART II: IDEAL BEINGS, IDEAL LANGUAGES The Cat and the Whiskers: Tolkien's Linguistic Creation 'Linguistic Aesthetic': Sounds, Meaning and the Pursuit of Beauty Ideal Languages and Phonetic Spelling PART III: FROM MYTH TO HISTORY The Claim to History A Hierarchical World Visualising Middle-earth: Real and Imagined Material Cultures Epilogue: From Fairies to Hobbits Appendix: 'And Wither Then?': Stepping into the Road Bibliography Index
£24.99
Columbia University Press The Scaffolding of Sovereignty
Book SynopsisThe Scaffolding of Sovereignty deploys a comparative and theoretically rich conception of sovereignty to reconsider the different schemes on which it has been based or renewed, the public stages on which it is erected or destroyed, and the images and ideas on which it rests.Trade ReviewThat sovereign power is often fragile and never established once and for all is the startling proposition that organizes this spectacularly interesting sequence of investigations. Sovereignty is impossible to study, the essays propose, without attention to its ‘scaffolding,’ defined as all the symbolic management that power continually requires. Leaping across time and spanning the world, The Scaffolding of Sovereignty showcases scholarly gems that together reflect how the crown of sovereignty is kept in place—and sometimes slips. -- Samuel Moyn, author of Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal WorldThis volume showcases the best of global intellectual history. Sovereignty emerges as a complex force: aesthetically layered, politically mutable, historically contingent, and consistently elusive. At the same time, despite the apparent Eurocentrism of the concept's recent lineage, readers will come away convinced of the importance of sovereignty as an analytical category, key to making sense of political culture in world history and political thought in global context. -- Lauren Benton, author of A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900Joining performance studies with philosophy, theology, and ethnography, the figure of the scaffold aptly evokes the symbolic supports and global visibility of sovereignty today. The contributors to this ambitious collection of essays fearlessly disclose recurrent features of sovereignty across time and space, often beginning immanently with the cosmic cartographies generated by particular regimes and projected in aesthetic displays, liturgical exercises, and citational enterprises that reveal common themes in the global drama of majesty. -- Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, IrvineThis is a wide-ranging, stimulating, challenging collection of essays. -- Jerrold Seigel, William J. Kenan, Jr., Professor of History Emeritus at New York University.Table of ContentsForeword, by Dick HowardEditors' Introduction, by Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Nicole JerrPart I. StagesPreface1. Sad Stories of the Death of Kings: Sovereignty and Its Constraints in Greek Tragedy and Elsewhere, by Glenn W. Most2. Contested Sovereignty: Heaven, the Monarch, the People, and the Intellectuals in Traditional China, by Yuri Pines3. Nurhaci's Gambit: Sovereignty as Concept and Praxis in the Rise of the Manchus, by Nicola Di Cosmo4. The Living Image of the People, by Jason FrankPart II. CourtsPreface5. Public Health, the State, and Religious Scholarship: Sovereignty in Idrīs al-Bidlīsī's Arguments for Fleeing the Plague, by Justin Stearns6. The Dancing Despot: Toyotomi Hideyoshi and the Performative Symbolism of Power, by Stanca Scholz-Cionca7. Liberal Constitutionalism and the Sovereign Pardon, by Bernadette Meyler8. The Vanishing Slaves of Paris: The Lettre de Cachet and the Emergence of an Imperial Legal Order in Eighteenth-Century France, by Miranda Spieler9. Re-touching the Sovereign: Biochemistry of Perpetual Leninism, by Alexei YurchakPart III. ActsPreface10. Hijra and Exile: Islam and Dual Sovereignty in Qing China, by Zvi Ben-Dor Benite11. The Neurology of Regicide: Decapitation Experiments and the Science of Sovereignty, by Cathy Gere12. The "Millennium" of 1857: The Last Performance of the Great Mughal, by A. Azfar Moin13. Exit the King? Modern Theater and the Revolution, by Nicole JerrPart IV. ShiftsPreface14. Revolution in Permanence and the Fall of Popular Sovereignty, by Dan Edelstein15. Exile Within Sovereignty: Critique of "The Negation of Exile" in Israeli Culture, by Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin16. Affective Sovereignty, International Law, and China's Legal Status in the Nineteenth Century, by Li Chen17. The Sovereignty of the New Man After Wagner: Artist and Hero, Symbolic History, and the Staging of Origins, by Stefanos GeroulanosList of ContributorsIndex
£28.50
Columbia University Press Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism European
Book SynopsisA tribute to one of the fathers of deconstruction as well as an extended essay on memory, death, and friendship.Trade ReviewDerrida offers significant insights into de Man's understanding of Heidegger, Hoderlin, Hegel, Austin, and Rosseau. A warm, personal, and at times touching account of the de Man/Derrida intellectual friendship and the existential experience of a friend's death, this work shows a very human side to a thinker whose humanity has been questioned by the critics. A welcome addition to any library already containing some writings of Derrida. Choice
£24.00
Columbia University Press Notes to Literature European Perspectives A
Book SynopsisA brilliant collection of short essays on literary subjects e.g. Beckett, Balzac, Proust, Thomas Mann, Dickens, Goethe, Heine, the lyric, realism, the essay, and the contemporary novel by the great social theorist (1903-1969), originally published in 1958 as Noten zur literature (Suhrkamp Verlag, FTrade Review"Adorno's Notes to Literature, which begins with the high leap of his great essay 'The Essay as Form,' sets an inimitable, always exhilarating standard. A volume of Adorno's essays is equivalent to a whole shelf of books on literature." -- Susan Sontag
£87.40
Columbia University Press American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to
Book Synopsis-- American LiteratureTrade ReviewLeitch's book is an achievement of geniune merit and...will contribute much to the self-understanding of the American Critical institutions. Modern Language Notes
£29.75
Columbia University Press Left Politics and the Literary Profession Social
Book SynopsisTable of ContentsWhy theory?, by Gerald Graff The function of English at the present time, by Richard Ohmann What am I doing when I do women's studies in 1990?, by Catharine R. Stimpson Literature and politics: black feminist scholars reshaping literary education in the white university, 1970-1986, by Nellie Y. McKay What is the matter with Mary Jane? Feminist criticism in a time of diminished expectations, by Kate Ellis Canon theory and emergent practice, by Paul Lauter Canon fathers and myth universe, by Lillian S. Robinson Literature of resistance: the intersection of feminism and the communist left in Meridel Le Sueur and Tillie Olsen, by Constance Coiner Memory and historical record: the literature and literary criticism of Beirut, 1982, by Barbara Harlow. At the crossroads of history, on the borders of change: Chicano literary studies past, present, and future, by Hector Calderon Third plane at the change of the century: the shape of African-American literature to come, by Pancho Savery History as explanation: writing about lesbian writing, or "Are girls necessary?", by Julie Abraham Politics and literature: then and now, by Robert C. Rosen Somewhere off the coast of academia, by Robert Rich Some historical refractions, by Lillian S. Robinson What has happened to the seeds of the flower children?, by Susan Gushee O'Malley Annals of academic life: an exemplary tale, by Louis Kampf
£98.10
Columbia University Press The Dialogic and Difference AnOther Woman in
Book SynopsisThis juxtaposition of Virginia Woolf and Christa Wolf, writers of two distinct cultures, countries and generations, focuses on the strategies the two authors share in creating their female characters. Hermann looks at each author within the social and historical conditions that produced them, employ
£64.00
Columbia University Press Notes to Literature
Book SynopsisAvailable in English for the first time, this is a collection of essays by social philosopher and critic, T.W. Adorno, on such writers as Mann, Bloch, Holderlin, Kare Kraust, Sigfried Kracauer, Goethe, Benjamin and Stefan George. It includes Adorno's reflections on a variety of literary subjects.
£28.50
Columbia University Press The Brazilian Puzzle Culture on the Borderlands
Book SynopsisThis book constitutes a critical investigation and rethinking of the grounds and possibilities of theory and the place and critical function theory can serve within various disciplines, notably history and aesthetics.
£56.00
Columbia University Press The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and
Book SynopsisMore than 450 succinct entries from A to Z help readers make sense of the interdisciplinary knowledge of cultural criticism that includes film, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, poststructuralist, and postmodernist theory as well as philosophy, media studies, linguistics.
£90.40
Columbia University Press The Inhuman Race The Racial Grotesque in
Book SynopsisIn revealing the source of the ideology of whiteness in the imagination, Cassuto turns to images of blackness in American literature and culture from 1622 to 1865, examining such texts as Swallow Barn, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Typee, and Moby Dick.
£90.00
Columbia University Press The Russian Intelligentsia
Book SynopsisHaving returned to Russia in 1990 after two decades, the writer known as Abram Tertz creates a vivid picture of today's Russian intelligentsia and its role as conscience and critic since the fall of communism, as well as a chilling portrait of economic and political stagnation under Yeltsin.Trade ReviewAn unflinching, passionate account of what has gone wrong in Russia since the collapse of the Bolshevik system-and of the complicity of the most privileged segment of the intelligentsia in the Yeltsin-era crimes and catastrophes--by a voice of incomparable moral authority, intelligence, and persuasiveness. Susan SontagTable of ContentsIntroduction Strolls with Pushkin A Journey to the River Black Remembering Cathy Nepomnyaschchy and Slava Yastremski Notes Notes on the Text
£38.25
Columbia University Press The Sense and NonSense of Revolt
Book SynopsisLinguist, psychoanalyst and cultural theorist Julia Kristeva explores one aspect of 20th-century culture - rebellion - in this text. She illustrates the advances and impasses of rebel culture through the experiences of three 20th-century writers: Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Aragon and Roland Barthes.Trade ReviewKristeva is a figure of far-reaching eloquence. -- Denis Donaghue Washington PostTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. What Revolt Today? 2. The Sacred and Revolt: Various Logics 3. The Metamorphoses of "Language" in the Freudian Discovery (Freudian Models of Language) 4. Oedipus Again; or, Phallic Monism 5. On the Extraneousness of the Phallus; or, the Feminine Between Illusion and Disillusion 6. Aragon, Defiance, and Deception: A Precursor? 7. Sartre; or, "We Are Right to Revolt" 8. Roland Barthes and Writing as Demystification
£70.40
Columbia University Press The Range of Interpretation The Wellek Library
Book SynopsisIn this work philosopher Wolfgang Iser offers a fresh perspective on questions such as why do human beings need fictions? And why do human beings need to interpret, despite the fact that complete interpretation is unattainable?Trade Review[Range of Interpretation] leaves the reader with a greatly expanded understanding of the nature of interpretation, of the various roles it assumes in our culture, and it is difficult to imagine a scholar who would not profit from such a book. Philosophy in ReviewTable of Contents1. Introduction The Marketplace of Interpretation Interpretation as Translatability 2. The Authority of the Canon Canonization and Midrash The Literary Canon: Dr. Johnson on Shakespeare 3. The Hermeneutic Circle Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher: Self-reflective Circularity Johann Gustav Droysen: The Nesting of Circles Paul Ricoeur: Transactional Loops 4. The Recursive Loop Recursion in Ethnographic Discourse Systemic Recursion 5. The Traveling Differential: Franz Rosenzweig, "The Star of Redemption" "The Birth of the Elements Out of the Somber Foundations of Nought" Proliferating Translatability 6. Configurations of Interpretation: An Epilogue
£82.80
Columbia University Press The Theory Mess Deconstruction in Eclipse
Book SynopsisA clarifying account of the general landscape of critical theory in the United States over the last 30 years ending with the current eclipse of deconstruction.Trade ReviewAn extensive and careful evaluation, through which Rapaport performs an inestimable service. SubStanceTable of ContentsPreface Introduction Beginnings Co-opting Deconstruction Theory as Postphilosophy: Rosi Braidotti, Geoffrey Hartman, Annette Kolodny The Misconstruction of Deconstruction: Gerald Graff and Frank Lentricchia Demonizing Deconstruction: Walter Jackson Bate, RenC Wellek, and David Lehman America is Deconstruction? Non-Placet A World Apart: Derrida and the Frankfurt School 1980--1987: A World of Difference Deconstructing Otherwise: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak British Developments: The Influence of AeMDULOScreenAeMDNMO Eclipsing Deconstruction: History of Subject-Positions I Eclipsing Deconstruction: History of Subject-Positions II Lurching to the Right Social Acts and Excitable Speech Vicious Dualisms Deconstruction of the Social Relation I: Heidegger and Sex Deconstruction of the Social Relation II: Derrida's Itineraries Derrida and the Political Reconceiving the Theory Mess Postscript Notes Bibliography
£79.20
Columbia University Press A Theory of Narrative
Book SynopsisNarrative is a powerful element of human culture, storing and sharing the cherished parts of our personal memories and giving structure to our laws, entertainment, and history. This book introduces an approach to studying narrative, identifying three basic strategies: single focus, dual focus, and multiple focus.Trade ReviewThis is a large, ambitious study that proposes an original, comprehensive theory of narrative. Rick Altman draws on examples ranging from the Bible to Hollywood films, from classical epic and pastoral to medieval heroic poetry, and from saints' lives to nineteenth- and twentieth-century French, British, and American novels, all analyzed within an impressively parsimonious scheme. -- Peter Garrett, University of Illinois An elegant and pertinent theory. -- Matt Campora Media/Culture ReviewsTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Note 1. What is Narrative? 2. The Song...of Roland? 3. Dual-Focus Narrative 4. Hester's Speculation 5. Single-Focus Narrative 6. Pieter Bruegel, or the Space of Multiplicity 7. Multiple-Focus Narrative 8. Theoretical Conclusion 9. Practical Conclusion References Index
£100.00
Columbia University Press Course in General Linguistics
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewI am delighted that Wade Baskin's classic translation is back in print, especially since Saussy and Meisel's judicious updating and summary of recent scholarly discoveries make this an invaluable resource for English readers.Table of ContentsEditors' Preface and Acknowledgments Textual Note Introduction: Saussure and His Contexts Course in General Linguistics Translator's Introduction Preface to the First Edition Introduction Chapter I. A Glance at the History of Linguistics Chapter II. Subject Matter and Scope of Linguistics; Its Relations with Other Sciences Chapter III. The Object of Linguistics Chapter IV. Linguistics of Language and Linguists of Speaking Chapter V. Internal and External Elements of Language Chapter VI. Graphic Representation of Language Chapter VII. Phonology Appendix: Principles of Phonology Chapter I. Phonological Species Chapter II. Phonemes in the Spoken Chain Part One: General Principles Chapter I. Nature of the Linguistic Sign Chapter II. Immutability and Mutability of the Sign Chapter III. Static and Evolutionary Linguistics Part Two: Synchronic Linguistics Chapter I. Generalities Chapter II. The Concrete Entities of Language Chapter III. Identities, Realities, Values Chapter IV. Linguistic Value Chapter V. Syntagmatic and Associative Relations Chapter VI. Mechanism of Language Chapter VII. Grammar and Its Subdivisions Chapter VIII. Role of Abstract Entities in Grammar Part Three: Diachronic Linguistics Chapter I. Generalities Chapter II. Phonetic Changes Chapter III. Grammatical Consequences of Phonetic Evolution Chapter IV. Analogy Chapter V. Analogy and Evolution Chapter VI. Folk Etymology Chapter VII. Agglutination Chapter VIII. Diachronic Unites, Identities, and Realities Appendices to Parts Three and Four Part Four: Geographical Linguistics Chapter I. Concerning the Diversity of Languages Chapter II. Complication of Geographical Diversity Chapter III. Causes of Geographical Diversity Chapter IV. Spread of Linguistic Waves Part Five: Concerning Retrospective Linguistics Chapter I. The Two Perspectives of Diachronic Linguistics Chapter II. The Oldest Language at the Prototype Chapter III. Reconstructions Chapter IV. The Contribution of Language to Anthropology and Prehistory Chapter V. Language Families and Linguistic Types Errata Notes Works Cited Index
£79.20
Columbia University Press Course in General Linguistics
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewI am delighted that Wade Baskin's classic translation is back in print, especially since Saussy and Meisel's judicious updating and summary of recent scholarly discoveries make this an invaluable resource for English readers.Table of ContentsEditors' Preface and Acknowledgments Textual Note Introduction: Saussure and His Contexts Course in General Linguistics Translator's Introduction Preface to the First Edition Introduction Chapter I. A Glance at the History of Linguistics Chapter II. Subject Matter and Scope of Linguistics; Its Relations with Other Sciences Chapter III. The Object of Linguistics Chapter IV. Linguistics of Language and Linguists of Speaking Chapter V. Internal and External Elements of Language Chapter VI. Graphic Representation of Language Chapter VII. Phonology Appendix: Principles of Phonology Chapter I. Phonological Species Chapter II. Phonemes in the Spoken Chain Part One: General Principles Chapter I. Nature of the Linguistic Sign Chapter II. Immutability and Mutability of the Sign Chapter III. Static and Evolutionary Linguistics Part Two: Synchronic Linguistics Chapter I. Generalities Chapter II. The Concrete Entities of Language Chapter III. Identities, Realities, Values Chapter IV. Linguistic Value Chapter V. Syntagmatic and Associative Relations Chapter VI. Mechanism of Language Chapter VII. Grammar and Its Subdivisions Chapter VIII. Role of Abstract Entities in Grammar Part Three: Diachronic Linguistics Chapter I. Generalities Chapter II. Phonetic Changes Chapter III. Grammatical Consequences of Phonetic Evolution Chapter IV. Analogy Chapter V. Analogy and Evolution Chapter VI. Folk Etymology Chapter VII. Agglutination Chapter VIII. Diachronic Unites, Identities, and Realities Appendices to Parts Three and Four Part Four: Geographical Linguistics Chapter I. Concerning the Diversity of Languages Chapter II. Complication of Geographical Diversity Chapter III. Causes of Geographical Diversity Chapter IV. Spread of Linguistic Waves Part Five: Concerning Retrospective Linguistics Chapter I. The Two Perspectives of Diachronic Linguistics Chapter II. The Oldest Language at the Prototype Chapter III. Reconstructions Chapter IV. The Contribution of Language to Anthropology and Prehistory Chapter V. Language Families and Linguistic Types Errata Notes Works Cited Index
£25.20
Columbia University Press The Critical Pulse
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewBoth autobiography and declaration of principle, these credos are dispatches from the trenches of literary criticism. They will inspire future scholars even as they register the uncertainties of an increasingly precarious profession. -- Martin Puchner, Harvard University, author of The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy Williams and Steffen's engaging, diverting, and thought-provoking analysis spells out the predicament facing literary criticism today. These essays represent thinking, argument, knowledge, and life experience that should be preserved and kept available for its own sake. -- Brian Lennon, Pennsylvania State University, author of In Babel's Shadow: Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States This piquant and welcome volume presents the 'credos' of 36 scholars-reflections on why criticism matters, why and how they do the work they do, and what they hope to accomplish. Publishers WeeklyTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Criticism in a Difficult Time A Critic's Progress 1. The Case for Scholarly Reporting, by Andrew Ross 2. Declarations of Independence, by Amitava Kumar 3. On Critique and Inheritance, by Lisa Lowe 4. What I Believe and Why, by Vincent B. Leitch 5. Hearing Losses and Gains, by Craig Womack 6. Long Island Intellectual, by Jeffrey J. Williams Academic Labor 7. We Work, by Marc Bousquet 8. What Is Criticism on Academic Labor For?, by Katie Hogan 9. "All Things Visible and Invisible": Believing in Higher Education, by Michelle A. Masse 10. Against Heroism, by John Conley 11. Pack Consciousness, by Heather Steffen Declarations of Politics 12. Activism and Curriculum, by Paul Lauter 13. Revolutionary Consciousness, by Cary Nelson 14. Geopolitical Translators, by David B. Downing 15. Critical Credo, by Barbara Foley 16. This I Believed, by Michael Berube 17. "Hope Dies Last": Cultural Studies and Studs Terkel, by Victor Cohen Pedagogical Moments 18. Credo of a Teacher, by Gerald Graff 19. Of Credos and Credibility, by William Germano 20. Teaching Friction, by Ann Pellegrini 21. Coerced Confessions, by Bruce Robbins 22. On Race and Literature, by Kenneth Warren 23. Teaching Theory, by Diana Fuss 24. Affect Is the New Trauma, by Lauren Berlant The Defense of Literature 25. Access to the Universal: Language, Literature, and the Humanities, by Toril Moi 26. Wrestling with the Angel: A Modest Critical Credo, by Morris Dickstein 27. Everyday Aesthetics, by Rita Felski 28. Criticism Is Vital, by David R. Shumway 29. Critical Credo, by Mark Bauerlein 30. Why I'm Still Writing Women's Literary History, by Devoney Looser New Turns 31. Without Evidence, by Stephen Burt 32. All There Is to Use, by Mark Greif 33. Open, by Kathleen Fitzpatrick 34. Timing, by Mark McGurl 35. The Politics of Small Problems, by Frances Negron-Muntaner 36. The Power of Unknowing, by Judith Jack Halberstam List of Contributors
£79.20
Columbia University Press The Critical Pulse
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewBoth autobiography and declaration of principle, these credos are dispatches from the trenches of literary criticism. They will inspire future scholars even as they register the uncertainties of an increasingly precarious profession. -- Martin Puchner, Harvard University, author of The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy Williams and Steffen's engaging, diverting, and thought-provoking analysis spells out the predicament facing literary criticism today. These essays represent thinking, argument, knowledge, and life experience that should be preserved and kept available for its own sake. -- Brian Lennon, Pennsylvania State University, author of In Babel's Shadow: Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States This piquant and welcome volume presents the 'credos' of 36 scholars-reflections on why criticism matters, why and how they do the work they do, and what they hope to accomplish. Publishers WeeklyTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Criticism in a Difficult Time A Critic's Progress 1. The Case for Scholarly Reporting, by Andrew Ross 2. Declarations of Independence, by Amitava Kumar 3. On Critique and Inheritance, by Lisa Lowe 4. What I Believe and Why, by Vincent B. Leitch 5. Hearing Losses and Gains, by Craig Womack 6. Long Island Intellectual, by Jeffrey J. Williams Academic Labor 7. We Work, by Marc Bousquet 8. What Is Criticism on Academic Labor For?, by Katie Hogan 9. "All Things Visible and Invisible": Believing in Higher Education, by Michelle A. Masse 10. Against Heroism, by John Conley 11. Pack Consciousness, by Heather Steffen Declarations of Politics 12. Activism and Curriculum, by Paul Lauter 13. Revolutionary Consciousness, by Cary Nelson 14. Geopolitical Translators, by David B. Downing 15. Critical Credo, by Barbara Foley 16. This I Believed, by Michael Berube 17. "Hope Dies Last": Cultural Studies and Studs Terkel, by Victor Cohen Pedagogical Moments 18. Credo of a Teacher, by Gerald Graff 19. Of Credos and Credibility, by William Germano 20. Teaching Friction, by Ann Pellegrini 21. Coerced Confessions, by Bruce Robbins 22. On Race and Literature, by Kenneth Warren 23. Teaching Theory, by Diana Fuss 24. Affect Is the New Trauma, by Lauren Berlant The Defense of Literature 25. Access to the Universal: Language, Literature, and the Humanities, by Toril Moi 26. Wrestling with the Angel: A Modest Critical Credo, by Morris Dickstein 27. Everyday Aesthetics, by Rita Felski 28. Criticism Is Vital, by David R. Shumway 29. Critical Credo, by Mark Bauerlein 30. Why I'm Still Writing Women's Literary History, by Devoney Looser New Turns 31. Without Evidence, by Stephen Burt 32. All There Is to Use, by Mark Greif 33. Open, by Kathleen Fitzpatrick 34. Timing, by Mark McGurl 35. The Politics of Small Problems, by Frances Negron-Muntaner 36. The Power of Unknowing, by Judith Jack Halberstam List of Contributors
£25.20
Columbia University Press The Frontier Within
Book SynopsisTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction "Poetry and Poets (Consciousness and the Unconscious)" (Shi to shijin [Ishiki to muishiki]) (1944) "Theory and Practice in Literature" (Bungaku ni okeru riron to jissen) (1954) "The Hand of a Calculator with the Heart of a Beast: What Is Literature?" (Moju no kokoro ni keisanki no te wo: Bungaku to ha nanika) (1955) "Discovering America" (Amerika hakken) (1957) "Does the Visual Image Destroy the Walls of Language?" (Eizo ha gengo no kabe wo hakai suru ka) (1960) "Artistic Revolution: Theory of the Art Movement" (Geijutsu no kakumei: Geijutsu undo no riron) (1960) "Possibilities for Education Today: On the Essence of Human Existence" (Gendai ni okeru kyoiku no kanosei: Ningen sonzai no honshitsu ni furete) (1965) "Beyond the Neighbor" (Rinjin wo koeru mono) (1966) "The Military Look" (Miritari rukku) (1968) "Passport of Heresy" (Itan no pasupoto) (1968) "The Frontier Within" (Uchi naru henkyo) (1968) "The Frontier Within, Part II" (Zoku: Uchi naru henkyo) (1969) Notes Glossary Index of Names
£80.39
Columbia University Press Poetic Machinations
Book SynopsisTraces the proliferation of formally experimental poetry to a growing fascination with allegory in philosophy, linguistics, critical theory, and aesthetics.Trade ReviewInfectiously interesting, Poetic Machinations is useful both as a survey of critical claims for allegory and as a practical guide for reading the challenges of contemporary poetry. -- Bob Perelman, University of Pennsylvania Clark Coolidge's photographic meta-process, Lyn Hejinian's alphabet, Susan Howe's Peirce, what Lorine Niedecker learned from Surrealism, what language writers learned from Czech and Russian Formalism, what Craig Dworkin learned from everyone-- Golston's provocative, ambitious, learned, and useful study unifies these discoveries under the banner of allegory, a term capacious enough to include many ways that Golston's challenging present-day writers highlight the invention, the arbitrariness, and yet the continuing meaningfulness, of their estranged, and yet explicable, forms. If you care for those writers-- and I do-- you will be glad you read Golston's book. -- Stephen Burt, Harvard University, author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry Poetic Machinations demonstrates that, from 1930s Objectivism to 2010s Conceptualism, poets have written allegorically, that is, taken metaphors--writing as photography, history as assembly line, colonial politics as printing press--and turned them into 'systematic procedures for formal composition.' Golston reassesses marquee names such as John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, and Myung Mi Kim, and he excels when analyzing 'formally extreme' poetry by Clark Coolidge and P. Inman. He twists the kaleidoscope and, suddenly, much writing that seemed illegible becomes pellucid. -- Brian Reed, University of WashingtonTable of ContentsPolemical Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Etymologies, 1980-the Allegorical Moment 1. Entomologies: Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker 2. Epistemologies: Clark Coolidge 3. A=L=L=E=G=O=R=I=E=S: Peter Inman, Myung Mi Kim, Lyn Hejinian 4. Semiologies: Susan Howe 5. Fictocritical Postlude: The Melancholy of Conceptualism Notes Works Cited Index
£46.75
Columbia University Press A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism Modernist
Book SynopsisBringing together leading critics and literary scholars, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism argues for new ways of understanding the nature and development of twentieth-century literature and culture.Trade ReviewA New Vocabulary for Global Modernism is an exciting roadmap for 21st-century ways of reading the aesthetics of a world always already globalized. Its creative mixture of old and new modernist vocabularies-e.g., form; slum; alienation; puppets; war; libraries--suggests innovative ways of reading the global in the local, the cross-cuts of multidirectional mobilities, the perpetually indigenizing processes of all modernisms. Resisting diffusionist, regional, or additive approaches, the book shifts the paradigm for reading globally. A must read in the field! -- Susan Stanford Friedman, author of Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time This brilliant collection of essays responds to perhaps the most urgent need in the scholarship on modernism-a guide and a set of terms that take us beyond the high modernist norm and induct readers into a world in which modern art and literature operated in a truly global public sphere. Written with clarity and intelligence, the book makes modernism appear new, again. -- Simon Gikandi, Robert Schirmer Professor of English, Princeton University The global turn in modernist studies constitutes not so much an expansion as an explosion. With received coordinates - geographic, temporal, national - obsolete, the field is unmappable. But if everything is modernism, nothing is. Enter A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism to articulate nodal points in a global network of modernism, making possible acts of provisional yet critical definition that serve not as gatekeepers but portals to a newer modernist studies. -- Mark A. Wollaeger, Vanderbilt UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments 1. Introduction, by Eric Hayot and Rebecca L. Walkowitz 2. Alienation, by Christopher Reed 3. Animal, by Efthymia Rentzou 4. Antiquity, by David Damrosch 5. Classic, by Tsitsi Jaji 6. Context, by Christopher Bush 7. Copy, by Jacob Edmond 8. Form, by Jahan Ramazani 9. Libraries, by B. Venkat Mani 10. Obsolescence, by Mark Goble 11. Pantomime, by Monica L. Miller 12. Puppets, by Martin Puchner 13. Slum, by David Pike 14. Style, by Judith Brown 15. Tradition, by Rachel Adams 16. Translation, by Gayle Rogers 17. War, by Mariano Siskind Appendix: More Vocabulary Contributors Index
£83.60
Columbia University Press A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism
Book SynopsisBringing together leading critics and literary scholars, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism argues for new ways of understanding the nature and development of twentieth-century literature and culture.Trade ReviewA New Vocabulary for Global Modernism is an exciting roadmap for 21st-century ways of reading the aesthetics of a world always already globalized. Its creative mixture of old and new modernist vocabularies-e.g., form; slum; alienation; puppets; war; libraries--suggests innovative ways of reading the global in the local, the cross-cuts of multidirectional mobilities, the perpetually indigenizing processes of all modernisms. Resisting diffusionist, regional, or additive approaches, the book shifts the paradigm for reading globally. A must read in the field! -- Susan Stanford Friedman, author of Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time This brilliant collection of essays responds to perhaps the most urgent need in the scholarship on modernism-a guide and a set of terms that take us beyond the high modernist norm and induct readers into a world in which modern art and literature operated in a truly global public sphere. Written with clarity and intelligence, the book makes modernism appear new, again. -- Simon Gikandi, Robert Schirmer Professor of English, Princeton University The global turn in modernist studies constitutes not so much an expansion as an explosion. With received coordinates - geographic, temporal, national - obsolete, the field is unmappable. But if everything is modernism, nothing is. Enter A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism to articulate nodal points in a global network of modernism, making possible acts of provisional yet critical definition that serve not as gatekeepers but portals to a newer modernist studies. -- Mark A. Wollaeger, Vanderbilt UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments 1. Introduction, by Eric Hayot and Rebecca L. Walkowitz 2. Alienation, by Christopher Reed 3. Animal, by Efthymia Rentzou 4. Antiquity, by David Damrosch 5. Classic, by Tsitsi Jaji 6. Context, by Christopher Bush 7. Copy, by Jacob Edmond 8. Form, by Jahan Ramazani 9. Libraries, by B. Venkat Mani 10. Obsolescence, by Mark Goble 11. Pantomime, by Monica L. Miller 12. Puppets, by Martin Puchner 13. Slum, by David Pike 14. Style, by Judith Brown 15. Tradition, by Rachel Adams 16. Translation, by Gayle Rogers 17. War, by Mariano Siskind Appendix: More Vocabulary Contributors Index
£25.20
Columbia University Press In Stereotype
Book SynopsisConfronts the importance of cultural stereotypes in shaping the ethics and reach of global literature.Trade ReviewThe stereotype-that fixed and frozen form of cultural unknowledge-is brought to animate life in this book. Rereading an indispensable archive of South Asian Anglophone fiction through iconic stereotypes of the postcolony and the postcolonial (hunger, crowds, slums, migrant dislocation, global metropolis, civil war's deathscape, and terror), Mrinalini Chakravorty brilliantly reveals what lies within the stereotype. Hypervisual and fetishistic, yet also spectacularly mobile, relational, and affectively charged, the stereotype emerges as a virtual and vital technology of literary globalism and a surprising education in ethical reading. -- Vilashini Cooppan, University of California, Santa Cruz, author of Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing, A well-theorized consideration... This reviewer knows of no comparable treatment of South Asian stereotypes... Highly recommended. CHOICE A lucid and provocative analysis of the significance of stereotype in contemporary South Asian literature. South Asian Review An important book not only for postcolonial studies of South Asian Anglophone literature and culture, but also for modeling what an ethical reading practice is and does in the so-called age of globalization. The Comparatist What Chakravorty's book allows is a wonderful meditation on the work of the stereotype... We learn to read the novel differently after reading her book, to make demands on our sensitivities at her urging and to our profit. Contemporary Literature A provocative and insightful catalogue of features that characterize stereotypes. -- Saikat Majumdar South Asian History and Culture The close readings one finds in every chapter offer marvelously useful material for classroom teaching and discussions of stereotypes in a postcolonial context. Modern Fiction Studies Eminently readable, it will be of interest to scholars and students of postcolonial studies, cultural studies of globalization, South Asian literature, and global literature... A remarkably cogent and clarifying book, lucid in its genealogical tracks and impassioned in its perusal of well-loved novels. Novel: A Forum on FictionTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Prologue: Stereotypes as Provocation 1. Why the Stereotype? Why South Asia? 2. To Understand Me, You'll Have to Swallow a World: Margins, Multitudes, and the Nation in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children 3. Slumdog or White Tiger? The Abjection and Allure of Slums 4. The Dead That Haunt Anil's Ghost: Subaltern Stereotypes and Postcolonial Melancholia 5. From Bangladesh to Brick Lane: The Biocultural Stereotypes of Migrancy 6. Good and Bad Transnationalisms: Outsourcing and Terror Epilogue: The Afterlife of Stereotypes Notes Bibliography Index
£80.39
Columbia University Press In Stereotype
Book SynopsisConfronts the importance of cultural stereotypes in shaping the ethics and reach of global literature.Trade ReviewThe stereotype-that fixed and frozen form of cultural unknowledge-is brought to animate life in this book. Rereading an indispensable archive of South Asian Anglophone fiction through iconic stereotypes of the postcolony and the postcolonial (hunger, crowds, slums, migrant dislocation, global metropolis, civil war's deathscape, and terror), Mrinalini Chakravorty brilliantly reveals what lies within the stereotype. Hypervisual and fetishistic, yet also spectacularly mobile, relational, and affectively charged, the stereotype emerges as a virtual and vital technology of literary globalism and a surprising education in ethical reading. -- Vilashini Cooppan, University of California, Santa Cruz, author of Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing, A well-theorized consideration... This reviewer knows of no comparable treatment of South Asian stereotypes... Highly recommended. CHOICE A lucid and provocative analysis of the significance of stereotype in contemporary South Asian literature. South Asian Review An important book not only for postcolonial studies of South Asian Anglophone literature and culture, but also for modeling what an ethical reading practice is and does in the so-called age of globalization. The Comparatist What Chakravorty's book allows is a wonderful meditation on the work of the stereotype... We learn to read the novel differently after reading her book, to make demands on our sensitivities at her urging and to our profit. Contemporary Literature A provocative and insightful catalogue of features that characterize stereotypes. -- Saikat Majumdar South Asian History and Culture The close readings one finds in every chapter offer marvelously useful material for classroom teaching and discussions of stereotypes in a postcolonial context. Modern Fiction Studies Eminently readable, it will be of interest to scholars and students of postcolonial studies, cultural studies of globalization, South Asian literature, and global literature... A remarkably cogent and clarifying book, lucid in its genealogical tracks and impassioned in its perusal of well-loved novels. Novel: A Forum on FictionTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Prologue: Stereotypes as Provocation 1. Why the Stereotype? Why South Asia? 2. To Understand Me, You'll Have to Swallow a World: Margins, Multitudes, and the Nation in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children 3. Slumdog or White Tiger? The Abjection and Allure of Slums 4. The Dead That Haunt Anil's Ghost: Subaltern Stereotypes and Postcolonial Melancholia 5. From Bangladesh to Brick Lane: The Biocultural Stereotypes of Migrancy 6. Good and Bad Transnationalisms: Outsourcing and Terror Epilogue: The Afterlife of Stereotypes Notes Bibliography Index
£23.75
Columbia University Press The Extinct Scene Late Modernism and Everyday
Book SynopsisExamines late modernism’s decisive turn toward everyday life, locating in the heightened scrutiny of details, textures, and experiences an intimate attempt to conceptualize geopolitical disorder.Trade ReviewThe Extinct Scene encourages us to see how British intellectuals, metropolitan and colonial, registered the impact of world-historical events-especially the Second World War and the collapse of the British Empire-through depictions of the everyday. With fresh readings of canonical writers and suggestive interpretations of less widely studied figures, this book offers a smart and timely contribution to the ongoing reevaluation of midcentury modernism. -- Peter Kalliney, University of Kentucky The Extinct Scene is a superb conceptual and historical contribution to twentieth-century literary studies, treating the period of geopolitical crisis between World War I and World War II. Thomas S. Davis rethinks the legacies of avant-gardism and modernism in Britain in the wake of World War I, tracing an 'outward turn' that enfolds modernist techniques into realist forms. With astute readings of texts and films that focus on everyday scenes and objects-amid bombed landscapes and under the specter of another war-Davis also considers how these aesthetics reflect authors' investments in state-rebuilding projects or in nationalist sentiment. Drawing deftly on critical theory, The Extinct Scene also develops an exemplary method for interpreting literature and authorship in its geopolitical context. -- Laura Doyle, University of Massachusetts The Extinct Scene opens up a new trove of modernist genres that gave literary form to the world-systemic transitions of the mid-twentieth century. Davis's insistence on the geopolitical rather than the global as the frame of reference for experimental writing makes this book more conceptually rigorous and politically current than other works in transnational modernisms. An entirely convincing account of the period, as deft in its fine-grained readings as it is inspiring in its theoretical ambition. -- Jed Esty, author of Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development [An] impressive study... [Davis] provides fresh insights into a period already intensely studied, offering new and wide-ranging interpretations... Recommended. Choice A brilliant and timely book... [The Extinct Scene] combines theoretical sophistication with historical detail to produce finely grained readings. -- Allan Hepburn Modernism / modernity [A] brilliant book... Davis brings a new level of archival density and diversity - from Mass-Observation to the Windrush generation - to bear on conversations about Modernism and the way we relate global events to the developing variety and social agility of aesthetic form throughout this convulsive era. -- David James Times Literary SupplementTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Late Modernism and the Outward Turn 1. The Last Snapshot of the British Intelligentsia: Documentary, Mass-Observation, and the Fate of the Liberal Avant-Garde 2. The Historical Novel at History's End 3. Late Modernism's Geopolitical Imagination: Everyday Life in the Global Hot Zones 4. War Gothic 5. "It is de age of colonial concern": Vernacular Fictions and Political Belonging Epilogue: "Appointments to keep in the past" Notes Bibliography Index
£80.39
Columbia University Press The Extinct Scene
Book SynopsisThomas S. Davis examines late modernism's decisive turn toward everyday life, locating in the heightened scrutiny of details, textures, and experiences an intimate attempt to conceptualize geopolitical disorder. The Extinct Scene reads a range of mid-century texts, films, and phenomena that reflect the decline of the British Empire.Trade ReviewThe Extinct Scene encourages us to see how British intellectuals, metropolitan and colonial, registered the impact of world-historical events—especially the Second World War and the collapse of the British Empire—through depictions of the everyday. With fresh readings of canonical writers and suggestive interpretations of less widely studied figures, this book offers a smart and timely contribution to the ongoing reevaluation of midcentury modernism. -- Peter Kalliney, University of KentuckyThe Extinct Scene is a superb conceptual and historical contribution to twentieth-century literary studies, treating the period of geopolitical crisis between World War I and World War II. Thomas S. Davis rethinks the legacies of avant-gardism and modernism in Britain in the wake of World War I, tracing an 'outward turn' that enfolds modernist techniques into realist forms. With astute readings of texts and films that focus on everyday scenes and objects—amid bombed landscapes and under the specter of another war—Davis also considers how these aesthetics reflect authors' investments in state-rebuilding projects or in nationalist sentiment. Drawing deftly on critical theory, The Extinct Scene also develops an exemplary method for interpreting literature and authorship in its geopolitical context. -- Laura Doyle, University of MassachusettsThe Extinct Scene opens up a new trove of modernist genres that gave literary form to the world-systemic transitions of the mid-twentieth century. Davis's insistence on the geopolitical rather than the global as the frame of reference for experimental writing makes this book more conceptually rigorous and politically current than other works in transnational modernisms. An entirely convincing account of the period, as deft in its fine-grained readings as it is inspiring in its theoretical ambition. -- Jed Esty, author of Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development[An] impressive study.... [Davis] provides fresh insights into a period already intensely studied, offering new and wide-ranging interpretations.... Recommended. * Choice *A brilliant and timely book.... [The Extinct Scene] combines theoretical sophistication with historical detail to produce finely grained readings. -- Allan Hepburn * Modernism / modernity *[A] brilliant book.... Davis brings a new level of archival density and diversity – from Mass-Observation to the Windrush generation – to bear on conversations about Modernism and the way we relate global events to the developing variety and social agility of aesthetic form throughout this convulsive era. -- David James * Times Literary Supplement *A valuable contribution to the growing scholarship on late modernism, to which it adds a compelling interpretive frame. . . . its theoretical reflections on 'everyday life' will benefit those seeking to develop a better understanding of how art mediates larger world-historical forces. -- Matthew Eatough * Modern Language Quarterly *There's a lot to admire in this wide-ranging study, which will certainly sharpen scholars' understanding of the ways late modernism rings the changes on what are arguably key themes for modernism tout court: the quotidian and the global. -- Len Gutkin * MFS: Modern Fiction Studies *A new and noteworthy account of the complicated aesthetic networks of interwar Britain. * Novel: A Forum on Fiction *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Late Modernism and the Outward Turn1. The Last Snapshot of the British Intelligentsia: Documentary, Mass-Observation, and the Fate of the Liberal Avant-Garde2. The Historical Novel at History's End3. Late Modernism's Geopolitical Imagination: Everyday Life in the Global Hot Zones4. War Gothic5. "It is de age of colonial concern": Vernacular Fictions and Political BelongingEpilogue: "Appointments to keep in the past"NotesBibliographyIndex
£23.75
Columbia University Press Neopoetics
Book SynopsisIn Neopoetics, Collins turns his attention to the cognitive evolution of the writing-ready brain. Further integrating neuroscience into the popular field of cognitive poetics, he adds empirical depth to our study of literary texts and verbal imagination and offers a whole new way to look at reading, writing, and creative expression.Trade ReviewProfessor Collins has shown, with his unique combination of interests, just how complex and unpredictably intricate the cognitive web of human culture has become. Of course, this is not the last word on the subject of how culture shapes and modifies our collective cognitive process; we have just begun the task of mapping out the territory to be explored. But exploration is inherently exciting in itself, and this book has significantly widened the scope of the project. -- Merlin Donald, author of "Origins of the Modern Mind" Neopoetics brings ideas from ancient Greece and modern literary and psychological theory together in describing the "writing-ready" brain. It is a work of impressive scholarship, though the literary extracts and occasionally anecdotal style make the book a pleasure to read. I think it will make a distinctive mark in fields of human understanding, including history, psychology, anthropology, literary criticism, musicology. -- Michael Corballis, author of From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language Christopher Collins weaves the strands of cognitive poetics - neuroscience, cognitive psychology, anthropology, linguistics and semiotics - into a masterful work of scholarship on literacy, language, memory and the mind that itself reads as beautifully as a novel. This book calls out to be picked up and read carefully by anyone interested in how writing transformed the traditionally oral cultures of ancient Greece and Rome into literate and literary ones, and indeed helped define our own cultural evolution as human beings -- William Short, University of Texas, San Antonio The word poetics is rooted in the Greek poiein, to 'build' or 'create.' In his 2013 book, Paleopoetics, Christopher Collins assessed how evolution gave rise to the "language-ready" brain and its ability to create tools that extends our thoughts. Neopoetics carries his story forward to illuminate how writing has transformed the way that language supports 'mindsharing,' performance and narrative. His exposition fruitfully augments the tools of literary analysis with well-judged perspectives from cognitive neuroscience in ways that extend to dance, music and emotion. -- Michael Arbib, University of Southern California Collins breathes new life into the constructionist premise that language shapes how humans think. Using the literary traditions of ancient Greece and Rome to examine the constraints that oral and written media, respectively, impose on narrative representation, Neopoetics suggests new ways of thinking about the cognitive mechanisms that shape cultural transmission. -- Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, University of Oregon Recommended. -- A. Kind CHOICETable of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments 1. Innovating Ourselves 2. Narrative Memory 3. The Dancing, Singing Daughters of Memory 4. Visual Instruments of Memory 5. Poets' Play and Plato's Poetics 6. Writing for the Voice 7. Writing and the Reading Mind Epilogue: Poetics and the Making of the Modern Self Appendix: Three Horatian Texts Notes Bibliography Index
£46.75
Columbia University Press Album
Book SynopsisAlbum provides an unparalleled look into Roland Barthes's life of letters. It presents a selection of correspondence, from his adolescence through the last years of his life. The first English-language publication of Barthes's letters, Album is a comprehensive testimony to one of the most influential critics of the twentieth century.Trade ReviewThe significance of this book-the first English-language publication of Barthes's correspondence-cannot be overestimated. Starting with Barthes's adolescence and the years in his late twenties spent in a sanatorium, these selected letters represent exchanges with longtime personal friends as well as many of the key figures of twentieth-century French intellectual history. -- Diana Knight, University of NottinghamTable of ContentsForeword, by Éric MartyDeath of the FatherEncounter in the English Channel on the Night of October 26–27, 1916, Between German Destroyers and the Trawler Le MontaigneAcknowledgmentsNoteChronology1. From Adolescence to the Romance of the Sanatorium: 1932–462. The First Barthes3. The Great Ties4. A Few Letters Regarding a Few Books5. ExchangesNotesIndex
£80.39
Columbia University Press Chimeras of Form
Book SynopsisAarthi Vadde shows why modernist literary form is essential to understanding the aspirational and analytical force of internationalism in and beyond Europe. She explains how major writers use modernist strategies to reshape how readers think about the cohesion and interrelation of political communities in the wake of empire.Trade ReviewVadde has written a supple, incisive, and richly thoughtful book. In smart and sophisticated readings, she rigorously thinks through modernist and postcolonial fiction's relation to the ingredients it collages, and she brilliantly illuminates such fiction's relation to an increasingly globalized world. -- Jahan Ramazani, author of Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres Chimeras of Form contributes richly and originally to the current remapping of modernism within non-eurocentric, international, and postcolonial coordinates across the twentieth century. Vadde eloquently argues that many modernist texts consciously enter the breach between these apparent oppositions. This book is a rare achievement, and one that will prompt new questions and productive debates in the field of modernist studies. -- Laura Doyle, author of Freedom's Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640-1940 With extraordinary subtlety and flair, Aarthi Vadde charts modernist internationalism as a persistent and shifting impulse toward experimentation in fictions that 'stretch the range of the sayable' in their chimeric, even confounding, depictions of the complexities of social life. Her deft readings will transform the way we understand the unexpected routes between modernism and postcolonialism to the point where those terms can no longer be taken as distinct categories tethered to period and geography. -- Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism Vadde's expansive, sophisticated, and timely analysis unsettles conventional divisions between formalism and postcolonialism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, realism and utopianism, and Europe and its others. Through masterful readings, she demonstrates how in form and content Tagore, Joyce, McKay, Lamming, Ondaatje, and Zadie Smith disrupt given understandings of territory, community, unity, and belonging. Vadde persuasively reveals the importance of literary modernism for imagining nonnational forms of sociability, solidarity, and citizenship. -- Gary Wilder, author of Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World Vadde's contribution is her remarkable insight into the 'chimeral' forms of global modernism. These forms don't flaunt triumphal cosmopolitanism in the face of outmoded nationalisms. Rather they foreground the artificial and recycled style of posttraumatic globalization-after the ongoing displacements of the previous century. Such global coexistence is precarious and makeshift, and also more livable. -- Leela Gandhi, author of Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siecle Radicalism, and the Politics of FriendshipTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Chimeras of Form 1. Autotranslations: Rabindranath Tagore's Internationalism in Circulation 2. Alternating Asymmetry: International Solidarity and Self-Deception in James Joyce's Dubliners and "Cyclops" 3. Stories Without Plots: The Nomadic Collectivism of Claude McKay and George Lamming 4. Archival Legends: National Myth and Transnational Memory in the Works of Michael Ondaatje 5. Root Canals: Zadie Smith's Scales of Injustice Epilogue: Migritude-The Re-mediated Work of Art and Art's Mediating Work Notes Bibliography Index
£69.26
Columbia University Press Socialist Cosmopolitanism The Chinese Literary
Book SynopsisSocialist Cosmopolitanism offers an innovative interpretation of literary works from the Mao era that reads Chinese socialist literature as world literature. Nicolai Volland demonstrates that Chinese socialist literature was not driven solely by politics but by an ambitious—but ultimately doomed—attempt to redraw the literary world map.Trade ReviewNicolai Volland has tackled one of the most provocative issues in modern Chinese and world literature. Chinese socialist literature from the 1940s to the eve of the Great Cultural Revolution has for decades been interpreted solely in terms of propaganda. Volland argues for a more comprehensive understanding of its conception, production, circulation, and reception. Through the prism of socialist cosmopolitanism, Volland offers a new look at issues from translation to transculturation, from the technology of media to the politics of world literature. -- David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University This book should be required reading for anyone interested in the development of global literary systems in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Volland skillfully sketches the structure of a socialist literary world-system from the Chinese perspective, revealing exciting possibilities for world literature studies. As noteworthy for its sensitive readings of its texts as for its theoretical argument, Volland's book breaks important new ground. -- Alexander Beecroft, University of South Carolina Socialist Cosmopolitanism forcefully intervenes in the study of modernity, crosscultural circulation, and Communist cultural institutions. The book contributes new paradigms to the study of modern China, world literature, and literary history and criticism. Volland argues that the Maoist "red classics" should be understood as part of the trajectory of literary development in China and abroad. Moreover, he shows that the Cold War ideological polarization was accompanied by a strong cosmopolitan impulse, one that has shaped literary works and the concept of literature itself. -- Yomi Braester, University of WashingtonTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1. The Politics of Texts in Motion 2. The Geopoetics of Land Reform in Northeast Asia 3. Fictionalizing the International Working Class 4. Soviet Spaceships in Socialist China 5. Sons and Daughters of the Revolution 6. Mapping the Brave New World of Literature Conclusion Notes Glossary of Chinese Characters Bibliography Index
£69.26
Columbia University Press Conversion Disorder Listening to the Body in
Book SynopsisPart memoir, part clinical case, part theoretical investigation, this book searches for the body. Jamieson Webster traces conversion’s shifting meanings in an intimate account of her own conversion from patient to psychoanalyst, as well as her continual struggle to apprehend the complexities of the patient’s body.Trade Review[Conversion Disorder] masterfully integrates some pretty heavy psych theory into a surprisingly personal framework. Intellectually dense but definitively accessible, the book illustrates what it is that makes Jamieson unique. * VICE *Conversion Disorder accomplishes a formidable task, for it is a book that speaks to readers who are making their very first forays into the study of psychoanalysis and to those scholars and clinicians who have long been thinking about the field’s most foundational questions, including hysteria, anxiety, the body and the training of new analysts. * PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HISTORY *Being dragged into the orbit of Webster’s mind is like entering the Magic Mountain: you go in as a visitor, and stay as a patient. -- Tom Mcarthy, author of Remainder and Satin IslandJamieson Webster’s new work reflects upon that aspect of hysteria—or conversion disorder—that has eluded the attention of most commentators: the indifference of the subject at the very moment that the symptom is most clearly enacted. This point of departure allows Webster to think about what the body contains but also what traverses the body at a level that is prior to speech, that is perhaps the condition of speech itself. This incisive and unsettling meditation gives us a form of psychoanalytic writing that tracks the transference as bodily transformation and impasse. It is written in and for our times, when the courage and difficulty of the slow labor of psychoanalysis provides a perspective that eludes the certitudes of dogma and the exhilarations of false promises. Webster’s book asks us to stay within the domain of difficult exchange where what registers and shifts at the level of the body lets us know more about what we can expect of life and what our own living carries of the lives of others. Beautifully written, theoretically brave, and disturbing in all the best ways. -- Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory, University of California, BerkeleyJamieson Webster’s Conversion Disorder approaches the unscalable wall of failed sublimation that marks the problem of intensities that rise and fall without apparent events. “Through the question of affect, the body insists.” This is not affect theory in the usual critical sense—affect here means being affected, speaking to the kind of excitability that communicates beyond the scene. There’s beautiful writing here, giving us an account of the affective impasses of the symptom. -- Lauren Berlant, George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago, author of Cruel OptimismAs ever, Jamieson Webster's writing is provocative and challenging, inviting us to question the comfort zones of contemporary discourse. In her unique style, she combines a meditation on her own psychoanalytic practice with an engagement with clinical and conceptual issues that are relevant to all of us: anxiety, the body, desire, dreams, and what it means to listen to others. And, for the first time in psychoanalytic literature, there is an appendix about the author's appendix! -- Darian Leader, psychoanalyst and author of The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia, and DepressionConversion Disorder is a wonderful book and a pleasure to read—each page sparkles with insight. What I like in this book is the frankness of the author’s self-presentation—with her doubts about her profession, her family background marked by separation, and her many readings of philosophers, all interesting, some surprising, like Bachelard, but always bringing something relevant. -- Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania, American Academy of Arts and SciencesTable of ContentsIntroduction1. Daybreak2. Music of the Future3. Father Can’t You See4. Never the Right Man5. I Am Not a Muse6. Hysterical Ruinology7. Coitus Interruptus8. Three Visions of Psychoanalysis9. How to Splinter / How to Burn10. Forged in Stones11. The Sliding of the Ring12. The Analyst’s AnalysisAcknowledgmentsAppendixNotesReferencesIndex
£69.26
Columbia University Press Colonizing Language
Book SynopsisChristina Yi investigates linguistic nationalism in the formation of literary canons through an examination of Japanese-language cultural production by Korean and Japanese writers from the 1930s through the 1950s. She challenges conventional understandings of national literature by showing how Japanese language ideology shaped colonial histories.Trade ReviewColonizing Language adds an important and most readable, yet sophisticated discussion to the growing body of colonial and postcolonial studies, and particularly to that in the field of Korean literature of this period. * Pacific Affairs *Christina Yi’s fascinating book narrates the prehistory of the popular Japanese-language literary works written by ethnically Korean writers today. Yi’s careful readings show how the linguistic dilemmas faced by Japan’s colonial subjects became an inheritance that could not be simply returned despite the collapse of empire. A must-read for anyone interested in questions of postcolonialism and language. -- Janet Poole, University of TorontoChristina Yi’s Colonizing Language provides a wide-ranging overview of the emergence and development of Japanese-language writings by Korean writers from the colonial through postcolonial periods. Based on meticulous archival research of Korean, Japanese, and English-language sources, and effectively weaving together historical analysis with close literary readings, it promises to be an authoritative text in the field. -- Sejii Lippit, University of California, Los AngelesBy probing into Japanese-language cultural productions by ethnic Koreans and diasporic Japanese across the 1945 divide, Colonizing Language reveals and deconstructs the multiple borders that have become naturalized and interiorized in the formation of national language and national literary canons in both Japan and Korea. The book is essential to our rethinking of ‘Japanese’ and ‘Korean’ languages and literatures, and its theoretical sophistication deserves an even wider appeal and application outside of East Asian studies. -- Jin-Kyung Lee, University of California, San DiegoYi’s nuanced analysis of primary texts proves her prowess as a literary scholar. She expertly unearths traces of the colonial past lurking in literary texts to question the dominant idea of ‘national language’ in Japan and South Korea, which is indispensable to the equally dominant idea of the homogeneous ethnic nation in the two countries. -- Serk-Bae Suh, University of California, IrvineInsightful and elegant. Her book can be recommended to all students of social studies, sociolinguistics, the history of thought, and of course literary studies. * Japan Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsA Note on Names, Terminology, and TranslationsIntroduction1. National Language Ideology in the Age of Empire2. “Let Me In!”: Imperialization in Metropolitan Japan3. Envisioning a Literature of the Imperial Nation4. Coming to Terms with the Terms of the Past5. Colonial Legacies and the Divided “I” in Occupation-Period Japan6. Collaboration, Wartime Responsibility, and Colonial MemoryEpilogueAppendix: Korean Authors and Literary CriticsNotesSelected BibliographyIndex
£52.70
Columbia University Press Ulysses by Numbers
Book SynopsisUlysses has been read obsessively for a century. What if instead of focusing on the words to understand the structure, design, and history of Joyce's masterpiece, we pay attention to the numbers? Taking a computational approach, Ulysses by Numbers lets us see the novel's basic building blocks in a significantly new light.Trade ReviewNumbers in literature often have magical or secret meanings, but this remarkable book also shows us other, quite startling modes of literary counting, giving us the pleasure we find only in the best critical readings: we are surprised and we wonder what to do with our surprise. -- Michael Wood, author of Literature and the Taste of KnowledgeUlysses by Numbers is a winningly idiosyncratic piece of literary criticism, one that is both very much of its moment in many respects, and in a few others defiantly peculiar. Bulson has delivered a timely, restlessly inventive book that challenges the increasingly hostile polarization within literary studies about the use of quantitative evidence. It is a provocative call for, and demonstration of, a delirious, even enchanted kind of quantitative reading. -- Nicholas Dames, author of The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian FictionUlysses by Numbers is an intricate, dazzling account of how numbers mattered to Joyce. Written with engaging lucidity and wit, this highly original book explores the numerical unconsciousness of Ulysses through close analyses of style, characters, word counts, readerships, and compositional history. Bulson’s work is a permanent contribution to Joyce studies and essential reading both for Joyceans and for modernists more broadly. -- Katherine Mullin, author of James Joyce, Sexuality, and Social PurityNearly a century after it was first published, Ulysses still stands as the apotheosis of high modernism and a revolutionary moment in the history of western literature. But can the daring literary experiment be deconstructed like a complex mathematical equation? This intriguing book makes a convincing case that, yes, it is possible. * Irish Independent *This is undoubtedly an important contribution in Joyce studies. * Times Literary Supplement *Table of Contents0verture1ntroduction: Ulysses by NumbersNo. 1. Making Style Count No. 2. Words in ProgressNo. 3. One or How Many?No. 4. GIS JoyceNo. 5. Dating Ulysses3pilogue. Miscounts, Missed CountsNotes Index
£82.80
Columbia University Press Ulysses by Numbers
Book SynopsisUlysses has been read obsessively for a century. What if instead of focusing on the words to understand the structure, design, and history of Joyce’s masterpiece, we pay attention to the numbers? Taking a computational approach, Ulysses by Numbers lets us see the novel’s basic building blocks in a significantly new light.Trade ReviewNumbers in literature often have magical or secret meanings, but this remarkable book also shows us other, quite startling modes of literary counting, giving us the pleasure we find only in the best critical readings: we are surprised and we wonder what to do with our surprise. -- Michael Wood, author of Literature and the Taste of KnowledgeUlysses by Numbers is a winningly idiosyncratic piece of literary criticism, one that is both very much of its moment in many respects, and in a few others defiantly peculiar. Bulson has delivered a timely, restlessly inventive book that challenges the increasingly hostile polarization within literary studies about the use of quantitative evidence. It is a provocative call for, and demonstration of, a delirious, even enchanted kind of quantitative reading. -- Nicholas Dames, author of The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian FictionUlysses by Numbers is an intricate, dazzling account of how numbers mattered to Joyce. Written with engaging lucidity and wit, this highly original book explores the numerical unconsciousness of Ulysses through close analyses of style, characters, word counts, readerships, and compositional history. Bulson’s work is a permanent contribution to Joyce studies and essential reading both for Joyceans and for modernists more broadly. -- Katherine Mullin, author of James Joyce, Sexuality, and Social PurityNearly a century after it was first published, Ulysses still stands as the apotheosis of high modernism and a revolutionary moment in the history of western literature. But can the daring literary experiment be deconstructed like a complex mathematical equation? This intriguing book makes a convincing case that, yes, it is possible. * Irish Independent *This is undoubtedly an important contribution in Joyce studies. * Times Literary Supplement *Table of Contents0verture1ntroduction: Ulysses by NumbersNo. 1. Making Style Count No. 2. Words in ProgressNo. 3. One or How Many?No. 4. GIS JoyceNo. 5. Dating Ulysses3pilogue. Miscounts, Missed CountsNotes Index
£22.00
Columbia University Press Social Appearances
Book SynopsisIn this strikingly original book, Barbara Carnevali offers a philosophical examination of the roles that appearances play in social life. While Western metaphysics and morals have predominantly disdained appearances and expelled them from their domain, Carnevali invites us to look at society, ancient to contemporary, as an aesthetic phenomenon.Trade ReviewThis is a powerful and paradigm-shifting aesthetics of society, by a great philosophical talent. -- Simon Critchley, author of Tragedy, the Greeks, and UsBarbara Carnevali's concept of 'social aesthetics' is tremendously powerful, and explains a lot of otherwise baffling phenomena. Carnevali makes me think that the rise of Orban and Trump and the Brexit movement is better understood as a matter of social 'taste' than in terms of ideology, or economics, or identity. -- Blake Gopnik, author of WarholOscar Wilde famously quipped that only shallow people do not judge by appearances. This elegant, profound, and erudite book explores the startling proposition that we may indeed be what we seem. The reader of this book will not fail to be convinced that 'appearances' are constitutive of society. -- Eva Illouz, author of The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative RelationsEvery sentence in this brilliant book is a unit of thought; it’s as epigrammatic as Nietzsche and as seamlessly developed as, say, Hume. And it helps that it’s new. Carnevali has restored aesthetics to its central role in philosophy. -- Edmund White, author of The Unpunished Vice: A Life of ReadingTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsProloguePart I. Appearing: On the Aesthetic Foundations of Social Life1. Life as a Spectacle: Self-Display, Reflexivity, and Artifice2. Masks and Clothes: Medial Surfaces and the Dialectic of Appearing3. Aesthetic Mediation: A Theory of Representations4. Figures: Social Images5. Out of Control: The Alienated ImagePart II. Vanity and Lies: On the Hostility Toward Appearances6. “Vanity Fair”: The Frivolity of Worldliness7. Against the Mask: The Rise of Social Romanticism8. Against the Spectacle: The Crusade of Romantic Anticapitalism9. Against Aesthetic Values: Aestheticism, Aestheticization, and Staging10. Two Baptisms and a Divorce: Homo Economicus Versus Homo AestheticusPart III. Toward a Social Aesthetics: On the Sensible Logic of Society11. The Opening: Aesthetic Foundations of the Common World12. Aisthesis: Senses and Social Sensibility13. Social Taste and the Will to Please14. Aesthetic Labor and Social Design: The Value of Appearances15. Prestige and Other Magic SpellsConclusion: Social Immaterialism or the Philosophy of Andy WarholAfterwordAppendix: Illustrations Mentioned in the TextNotesIndex
£85.00
Columbia University Press Forms of Poetic Attention
Book SynopsisIdentifying a crucial link between poetic form and the forming of attention, Lucy Alford offers a new terminology for how poetic attention works and how attention becomes a subject and object of poetry. She combines close readings of a wide variety of poems with research in the philosophy, aesthetics, and psychology of attention.Trade ReviewToday, as our attention is nearly suffocated by the forces of commodification, Lucy Alford awakens us to the subtle powers and true breathing room that poems extend to us. Her focus ranges from Sappho to pre-Islamic poetry through the Renaissance to French and German modernism and the living poets of North America as she attends to the emergent forms of individual works and the manifold experiences of their reception. Close or far, immediate or withdrawn, vivid or abstract, with or without present subjects and objects, poets and their readers begin in perception and arrive at an ethics of care and even love. -- Susan Stewart, Avalon Foundation University Professor of the Humanities, Princeton UniversityWidely read in modern poetry and in philosophical, psychological, and sociological studies of attention, Lucy Alford has produced a boldly ambitious book with a new take on poetry in general and the sorts of things it can do. She explores how poems shape and are shaped by different kinds of attention with authority, eloquence, and sureness of touch. -- Jonathan Culler, author of Theory of the LyricLucy Alford’s elegant and original book incisively distinguishes among the various forms of poetic attention. Fusing lyrical responsiveness with sharp-eyed analysis, it offers supple and intricate readings of attention in a stunningly transnational and transhistorical array of poems, from ancient Egypt and Greece to contemporary America. -- Jahan Ramazani, author of Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of GenresAlford proposes a truly new taxonomy of interest to any student of poetry and poetics: how do poems hold our attention? What are the separable ways in which they do so? How does a poem send us back out into the rest of the world, and when does it encourage us to go, and to stay, nowhere? These questions apply not just to particular poets, but to the whole of a literary enterprise: Alford gives us an acoustically and aesthetically sensitive way to talk about poems from varying language and periods and about the diversity within their unity. -- Stephanie Burt, author of Don't Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read PoemsHer readings are sensitive and nuanced. * Choice *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: What Is Poetic Attention?Part I. Attending to Objects1. Modes of Transitive Attention2. Contemplation: Attention’s Reach3. Desire: Attention’s Hunger4. Recollection: Attending to the Departed Object5. Imagination: Attention’s PoiesisPart II. Objectless Awareness6. Modes of Intransitive Attention7. Vigilance: States of Suspension8. Resignation: Relinquishing the Object9. Idleness: Doldrums and Gardens of Time10. Boredom: End-Stopped AttentionCoda: Toward a Practice of Poetic AttentionNotesBibliographyPermission CreditsIndex
£91.52
Columbia University Press A Face Drawn in Sand Humanistic Inquiry and
Book SynopsisRey Chow rearticulates the plight of the humanities in the age of global finance and neoliberal mores through a focus on Foucault's concept outside. She foregrounds a nonutilitarian approach, stressing anew the intellectual and pedagogical objectives fundamental to humanistic inquiry.Trade ReviewIn this lucid, concise, and passionate book, Rey Chow theorizes the dire effects of entrepreneurial capitalism in our digital age while showing how a humanistic intellectual should confront the essential problems created and obscured by that capitalism. This recovery of Foucault is brilliant, timely, and liberating. -- Paul A. Bové, author of Love's ShadowIn A Face Drawn in Sand, Rey Chow not only offers a provocative and original reading of Foucault but also mobilizes this reading to analyze some of the most important oppositions in literary studies today: close reading versus distant reading, surface reading with its re-aestheticization of the text versus STEM-inspired social science approaches, identity versus racialization, among others. Rather than attempt simply to adjudicate these conflicts in the interests of compromise, Chow reconstructs their theoretical and historical conditions of possibility to determine how these oppositions came to be posed in their current form. In doing so, she allows us to rethink them and perhaps better articulate the problems they seek to address. This is a much-needed book. -- Warren Montag, coauthor of The Other Adam SmithIf, as Foucault said, we have yet to cut off the head of the king, Chow offers the sharpest blade yet: critique forged in immanence. With the equanimity of a saint and the tenacity of a battle-scarred scholar, she puts a point on Foucault’s productive hypothesis: to denounce power is not to say no to it. The result is a compelling series of interventions into the fields of study that matter most for humanistic inquiry today: critical race studies, sound studies, media studies, transnational and global studies. Chow’s gift is a vision of what these fields might be, beheaded. -- Thomas Lamarre, author of The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game MediaA Face Drawn in Sand cuts into the present with breathtaking clarity. Redeploying Foucault’s work in startling new ways, Chow engages everything from humanistic study in the neoliberal university to racism, sound theory, the digitized smart self, and sand painting. As brilliant as it is courageous, this book not only changes how we read Foucault. It teaches us how to think: how to press against the limits of our contemporary order. A tour de force! -- Lynne Huffer, author of Foucault's Strange ErosChow’s text accomplishes something rare these days: an original reading of Foucault that crackles with insight. * Critical Inquiry *Table of ContentsPart I. Humanistic Inquiry in the Era of the Moralist-EntrepreneurIntroduction: Rearticulating “Outside”Part II. Exercises in the Unthought1. Literary Study’s Biopolitics2. “There Is a ‘There Is’ of Light”; or, Foucault’s (In)visibilities3. Thinking “Race” with Foucault4. “Fragments at Once Random and Necessary”: The Énoncé Revisited, Alongside Acousmatic Listening5. From the Confessing Animal to the SmartselfCoda: Intimations from a Series of Faces Drawn in SandAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex
£76.00
Columbia University Press Extraterritorial
Book SynopsisExtraterritorial spaces fall outside of national borders but enhance state power. Matthew Hart reveals extraterritoriality’s centrality to twenty-first-century art and fiction and presents a new theory of literature that explains what happens when dreams of an open, connected world confront the reality of mobile, elastic, and tenacious borders.Trade ReviewExtraterritorial is a brilliantly original study of the global culture of our times and the extraterritorial space that it occupies, a space at the same time outside nations and states and within them. Hart offers a powerful argument for taking seriously how political geography is not just a topic for literature but also a force that shapes it from within. A provocative and convincing work both of theory and criticism. -- Adam Tooze, author of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the WorldA fascinating book about why the idea of being extraterritorial has come to preoccupy writers and artists and a rejoinder to celebrations of the cosmopolitan intellect or the ostensible age of postnational globalization. Hart highlights the aesthetic appeal and confusion arising from extraterritoriality’s mixture of loosening and constraint, of being outside but also within, in spaces where political determination is at once constant and violable. -- Sarah Brouillette, author of UNESCO and the Fate of the LiteraryMatthew Hart remarks that the concept of the extraterritorial has been ‘a minor ghost’ in the history of literary criticism. Not any more. This is an important study of the contemporary condition where people find themselves in weird enclaves of territory, strange folds of legality, or passing through those transitional pockets of airports, detention camps, freeports, or gated communities that increasingly define existence. Hart makes a compelling argument that this condition is tied to the shifting forms and genres of the contemporary novel. With exhilarating readings of J. G. Ballard, China Miéville, Hilary Mantel, Amitav Ghosh, and others, each chapter opens up hugely productive insights. An essential read. -- Roger Luckhurst, University of LondonHart’s timely book zeros in on fundamental tensions between sovereignty and territoriality that have only become more urgent in the current moment of crisis. Mining contemporary novels and works of art for insights into political geography, Hart expertly reveals the overlapping jurisdictions and mixed regimes of power that define our world of ‘gated communities, mobile border regimes, and insular solidarities.’ Extraterritorial offers a lively and engaging mix of theoretical speculation, historical thinking, and sophisticated cultural analysis. -- Michael Rothberg, author of The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators[B]rilliantly original . . . this book asks urgent questions about what it means to belong to a territory. * Times Higher Education *A very different ethical commitment emerges in Hart’s Extraterritorial to the revolutionary attitude of modernism, not one of escape, but a movement inwards, into the cracks. This is not a hopeless outlook; in fact, Hart’s prose is at times surprisingly joyful; his readings retain a kind of enchantment with the aesthetics of the zone. * ASAP/Journal *Recommended. * Choice *Hart reminds us, with a timeliness surely only intensified by a global pandemic, that the power of the state to draw borders, far from waning along with all the other signatures of high modernity, paradoxically intensifies under globalization. * NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Four Types of Extraterritoriality1. Zone2. City-State3. String Theory4. A Border That Is Not a Border5. SettlementConclusion: The Extraterritorial NovelNotesIndex
£76.00
Columbia University Press Extraterritorial A Political Geography of
Book SynopsisExtraterritorial spaces fall outside of national borders but enhance state power. Matthew Hart reveals extraterritoriality’s centrality to twenty-first-century art and fiction and presents a new theory of literature that explains what happens when dreams of an open, connected world confront the reality of mobile, elastic, and tenacious borders.Trade ReviewExtraterritorial is a brilliantly original study of the global culture of our times and the extraterritorial space that it occupies, a space at the same time outside nations and states and within them. Hart offers a powerful argument for taking seriously how political geography is not just a topic for literature but also a force that shapes it from within. A provocative and convincing work both of theory and criticism. -- Adam Tooze, author of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the WorldA fascinating book about why the idea of being extraterritorial has come to preoccupy writers and artists and a rejoinder to celebrations of the cosmopolitan intellect or the ostensible age of postnational globalization. Hart highlights the aesthetic appeal and confusion arising from extraterritoriality’s mixture of loosening and constraint, of being outside but also within, in spaces where political determination is at once constant and violable. -- Sarah Brouillette, author of UNESCO and the Fate of the LiteraryMatthew Hart remarks that the concept of the extraterritorial has been ‘a minor ghost’ in the history of literary criticism. Not any more. This is an important study of the contemporary condition where people find themselves in weird enclaves of territory, strange folds of legality, or passing through those transitional pockets of airports, detention camps, freeports, or gated communities that increasingly define existence. Hart makes a compelling argument that this condition is tied to the shifting forms and genres of the contemporary novel. With exhilarating readings of J. G. Ballard, China Miéville, Hilary Mantel, Amitav Ghosh, and others, each chapter opens up hugely productive insights. An essential read. -- Roger Luckhurst, University of LondonHart’s timely book zeros in on fundamental tensions between sovereignty and territoriality that have only become more urgent in the current moment of crisis. Mining contemporary novels and works of art for insights into political geography, Hart expertly reveals the overlapping jurisdictions and mixed regimes of power that define our world of ‘gated communities, mobile border regimes, and insular solidarities.’ Extraterritorial offers a lively and engaging mix of theoretical speculation, historical thinking, and sophisticated cultural analysis. -- Michael Rothberg, author of The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators[B]rilliantly original . . . this book asks urgent questions about what it means to belong to a territory. * Times Higher Education *A very different ethical commitment emerges in Hart’s Extraterritorial to the revolutionary attitude of modernism, not one of escape, but a movement inwards, into the cracks. This is not a hopeless outlook; in fact, Hart’s prose is at times surprisingly joyful; his readings retain a kind of enchantment with the aesthetics of the zone. * ASAP/Journal *Recommended. * Choice *Hart reminds us, with a timeliness surely only intensified by a global pandemic, that the power of the state to draw borders, far from waning along with all the other signatures of high modernity, paradoxically intensifies under globalization. * NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Four Types of Extraterritoriality1. Zone2. City-State3. String Theory4. A Border That Is Not a Border5. SettlementConclusion: The Extraterritorial NovelNotesIndex
£23.75
Columbia University Press Midcentury Suspension
Book SynopsisHow did literary artists confront the middle of a century already defined by two global wars and newly faced with a nuclear future? Claire Seiler argues that a sense of suspension—a feeling of being between beginnings and endings, recent horrors and opaque horizons—shaped transatlantic literary forms and cultural expression in this singular moment.Trade ReviewIt is impossible not to be impressed by the highly accomplished results on offer in Claire Seiler's reconfiguration of early postwar transatlantic literature in terms of the concept of the "midcentury" and the forms of temporal and theoretical suspension she identifies with it. I suspect that her revisionist efforts to construct the intellectual framework of the midcentury and its suspensions will significantly reshape our understanding of this period for years to come. -- Deak Nabers, author of Victory of Law: The Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil War, and American LiteratureThis is a powerfully illuminating and eloquent reconstruction of a moment when transatlantic writers understood themselves as citizens not so much of particular places as of their own fraught and ambiguous historical period. Anyone thinking about early postwar literature will have to reckon with the implications of this absolutely compelling book. -- Marina MacKay, author of Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime CriticIn Midcentury Suspension, Claire Seiler offers the most scholarly study of the midcentury to date—the literary midcentury in all its irresolution, time-consciousness, anxiety, and nuclear expectancy. With a pitch-perfect sense of detail, Seiler draws upon unknown archival sources to explain what history felt like to anglophone writers in Britain and the United States. Written with great verve, this book is a lucid—and necessary—account of why the midcentury matters. -- Allan Hepburn, author of A Grain of Faith: Religion in Mid-Century British LiteratureSeiler does the study of twentieth-century literature a major service . . . Essential reading for any scholar of twentieth-century Anglo American literature, Midcentury Suspension performs the impressive feat of examining, in close detail, several works by important Anglo American writers while linking them to each other and to their time through the heuristic of suspension. * Twentieth-Century Literature *Engaging and beautifully written . . . as well as offering a fresh perspective on each of the writers included, it makes a provocative contribution to midcentury studies more broadly. * American Literary History *Fiercely intelligent, beautifully argued . . . Our delayed, deferred discovery of midcentury literature and feeling in the suspensions of Claire Seiler’s boldly revisionary monograph teaches us what we have missed all these years in ‘works and writers perhaps deeply valued. . . but only partially known.’ * Modernism/modernity *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Midcentury Problem1. The Timely Suspensions of Elizabeth Bishop’s A Cold Spring2. W. H. Auden, Ralph Ellison, and the Midcentury Anxiety Consensus3. Elizabeth Bowen and Samuel Beckett Waiting in the Middle4. The Sonic Suspensions of Frank O’HaraAfterwordNotesSelect BibliographyIndex
£71.25
Columbia University Press Midcentury Suspension Literature and Feeling in
Book SynopsisHow did literary artists confront the middle of a century already defined by two global wars and newly faced with a nuclear future? Claire Seiler argues that a sense of suspension—a feeling of being between beginnings and endings, recent horrors and opaque horizons—shaped transatlantic literary forms and cultural expression in this singular moment.Trade ReviewIt is impossible not to be impressed by the highly accomplished results on offer in Claire Seiler's reconfiguration of early postwar transatlantic literature in terms of the concept of the "midcentury" and the forms of temporal and theoretical suspension she identifies with it. I suspect that her revisionist efforts to construct the intellectual framework of the midcentury and its suspensions will significantly reshape our understanding of this period for years to come. -- Deak Nabers, author of Victory of Law: The Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil War, and American LiteratureThis is a powerfully illuminating and eloquent reconstruction of a moment when transatlantic writers understood themselves as citizens not so much of particular places as of their own fraught and ambiguous historical period. Anyone thinking about early postwar literature will have to reckon with the implications of this absolutely compelling book. -- Marina MacKay, author of Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime CriticIn Midcentury Suspension, Claire Seiler offers the most scholarly study of the midcentury to date—the literary midcentury in all its irresolution, time-consciousness, anxiety, and nuclear expectancy. With a pitch-perfect sense of detail, Seiler draws upon unknown archival sources to explain what history felt like to anglophone writers in Britain and the United States. Written with great verve, this book is a lucid—and necessary—account of why the midcentury matters. -- Allan Hepburn, author of A Grain of Faith: Religion in Mid-Century British LiteratureSeiler does the study of twentieth-century literature a major service . . . Essential reading for any scholar of twentieth-century Anglo American literature, Midcentury Suspension performs the impressive feat of examining, in close detail, several works by important Anglo American writers while linking them to each other and to their time through the heuristic of suspension. * Twentieth-Century Literature *Engaging and beautifully written . . . as well as offering a fresh perspective on each of the writers included, it makes a provocative contribution to midcentury studies more broadly. * American Literary History *Fiercely intelligent, beautifully argued . . . Our delayed, deferred discovery of midcentury literature and feeling in the suspensions of Claire Seiler’s boldly revisionary monograph teaches us what we have missed all these years in ‘works and writers perhaps deeply valued. . . but only partially known.’ * Modernism/modernity *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Midcentury Problem1. The Timely Suspensions of Elizabeth Bishop’s A Cold Spring2. W. H. Auden, Ralph Ellison, and the Midcentury Anxiety Consensus3. Elizabeth Bowen and Samuel Beckett Waiting in the Middle4. The Sonic Suspensions of Frank O’HaraAfterwordNotesSelect BibliographyIndex
£22.50
