Literary theory Books
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
Columbia University Press The Fury Archives
Book SynopsisIn the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, radical women’s movements and the avant-gardes were often in contact with one another. Jill Richards argues that these movements were deeply interconnected. Rather than focus on the demand for the vote, The Fury Archives turns to the daily practices and social worlds of feminist action.Trade ReviewThe Fury Archives is a tour-de-force study of modernist women’s struggles for citizenship and human rights across transnational geographies. Richards reminds us of the variegated sites and everydayness of politics—from the sphere of reproductive labor to the quotidian committee meeting—and offers a compelling genealogy of the intersections between women’s rights and human rights. It is one of the most nuanced accounts of politics as praxis I have ever read. -- Janice Ho, author of Nation and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century British NovelJill Richards’s exploration of “the daily life of feminist action” brilliantly trains our attention on aspects of revolutionary work—routines and tactics, protocols and cycles—too often obscured in later histories. Traversing disciplines, genres, and oceans in unprecedented ways, it requires us to reconsider many of our most cherished assumptions about the relation between avant-garde art and political aspiration. -- Douglas Mao, author of Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature 1860-1960Jill Richards’s book is masterful in its range of inquiries, beautifully written, and elegantly argued. The research supporting the book’s radical and provocative arguments is also exceptionally thorough and meticulously engaged; it synthesizes and builds upon a number of comprehensive historical and theoretical debates. -- Elizabeth S. Anker, Cornell UniversityThe range of objects in The Fury Archives is truly impressive, and Richards tackles every object and text that she has excavated for analysis with great skill . . . Richards presents life stories that are not recorded in mainstream history and the unearthing of which creates a more inclusive, accurate, and complete picture of history. * ASAP/Journal *The sense of this being a history of the present is hard to ignore . . . That strategies such as the occupation of public spaces as an act of protest, strikes to try to accelerate governmental action or the naming of names as an act of acknowledgement and remembrance remain familiar and continue to be employed make many of the decades-old archives seem eerily contemporary. * ArtReview Asia *Traversing the boundary between the intimate and the public, Richards shows us how to look anew at female citizenship . . . [The Fury Archives] offers important methodological insights to human rights scholars concerned with the field's over-reliance on narrative history. * Human Rights Quarterly *In addition to rewriting the history of the avant-garde . . . to reveal more complicated entanglements with female citizenship, The Fury Archives offers an energizing model for how we might study feminist activism, sustain ourselves through the long slog of collective action, and intervene in our own here and now. * Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I. Sex and Citizenship in the Atlantic Archives1. The Fury Archives: Afterlives of the Female Incendiary2. The Long Middle: Militant Suffrage from Britain to South AfricaPart II. The Reproductive Atlantic3. The Art of Not Having Children: Birth Strike, Sabotage, and the Reproductive Atlantic4. Rhineland Bastards, Queer Species: An Afro-German Case StudyPart III. Convergences in Institutional Human Rights5. Surrealism’s Inhumanities: Chance Encounter, Lesbian Crime, Queer Resistance6. The Committee Form: Négritude Women and the United NationsEpilogue. Social Reproduction and the Midcentury Witch: Leonora Carrington in MexicoNotesBibliographyIndex
£83.60
Columbia University Press The Fury Archives Female Citizenship Human
Book SynopsisIn the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, radical women's movements and the avant-gardes were often in contact with one another. Jill Richards argues that these movements were deeply interconnected. Rather than focus on the demand for the vote, The Fury Archives turns to the daily practices and social worlds of feminist action.Trade ReviewThe Fury Archives is a tour-de-force study of modernist women’s struggles for citizenship and human rights across transnational geographies. Richards reminds us of the variegated sites and everydayness of politics—from the sphere of reproductive labor to the quotidian committee meeting—and offers a compelling genealogy of the intersections between women’s rights and human rights. It is one of the most nuanced accounts of politics as praxis I have ever read. -- Janice Ho, author of Nation and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century British NovelJill Richards’s exploration of “the daily life of feminist action” brilliantly trains our attention on aspects of revolutionary work—routines and tactics, protocols and cycles—too often obscured in later histories. Traversing disciplines, genres, and oceans in unprecedented ways, it requires us to reconsider many of our most cherished assumptions about the relation between avant-garde art and political aspiration. -- Douglas Mao, author of Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature 1860-1960Jill Richards’s book is masterful in its range of inquiries, beautifully written, and elegantly argued. The research supporting the book’s radical and provocative arguments is also exceptionally thorough and meticulously engaged; it synthesizes and builds upon a number of comprehensive historical and theoretical debates. -- Elizabeth S. Anker, Cornell UniversityThe range of objects in The Fury Archives is truly impressive, and Richards tackles every object and text that she has excavated for analysis with great skill . . . Richards presents life stories that are not recorded in mainstream history and the unearthing of which creates a more inclusive, accurate, and complete picture of history. * ASAP/Journal *The sense of this being a history of the present is hard to ignore . . . That strategies such as the occupation of public spaces as an act of protest, strikes to try to accelerate governmental action or the naming of names as an act of acknowledgement and remembrance remain familiar and continue to be employed make many of the decades-old archives seem eerily contemporary. * ArtReview Asia *Traversing the boundary between the intimate and the public, Richards shows us how to look anew at female citizenship . . . [The Fury Archives] offers important methodological insights to human rights scholars concerned with the field's over-reliance on narrative history. * Human Rights Quarterly *In addition to rewriting the history of the avant-garde . . . to reveal more complicated entanglements with female citizenship, The Fury Archives offers an energizing model for how we might study feminist activism, sustain ourselves through the long slog of collective action, and intervene in our own here and now. * Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I. Sex and Citizenship in the Atlantic Archives1. The Fury Archives: Afterlives of the Female Incendiary2. The Long Middle: Militant Suffrage from Britain to South AfricaPart II. The Reproductive Atlantic3. The Art of Not Having Children: Birth Strike, Sabotage, and the Reproductive Atlantic4. Rhineland Bastards, Queer Species: An Afro-German Case StudyPart III. Convergences in Institutional Human Rights5. Surrealism’s Inhumanities: Chance Encounter, Lesbian Crime, Queer Resistance6. The Committee Form: Négritude Women and the United NationsEpilogue. Social Reproduction and the Midcentury Witch: Leonora Carrington in MexicoNotesBibliographyIndex
£999.99
Columbia University Press Poetics of Liveliness Molecules Fibers Tissues
Book SynopsisAda Smailbegović shows how twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers have intermingled scientific methodologies with poetic form to reveal unfolding processes of change. Poetics of Liveliness moves across scales to explore the realms of molecules, fibers, tissues, and clouds.Trade ReviewIn a remarkable feat of interdisciplinary scholarship, this book plumbs the depths and scans the horizons of what it means to write on, in, of, and with “life” through a poetry and poetics of experimentation. Science meets poetry meets the ongoing unknown in a redefinition of environmental poetics—bravo! -- Cary Wolfe, author of Ecological Poetics; or, Wallace Stevens’s BirdsSmailbegović addresses the entwined relations between contemporary North American poetry and developments in philosophy, art, and science. She argues that each of these fields or practices address the same kinds of complexity in the world, both enabling language to emerge from the world (whether in human or animal form) and materiality to complexify and elaborate itself chemically and evolutionarily. -- Elizabeth Grosz, author of The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of MaterialismWriting as a poet versed in biology, physics, and meteorology, Smailbegović explains minute and slow-moving material phenomena as acutely as she does poetic nuance. Rather than unveil worlds normally imperceptible at human scale, her “edge work” tracks partial contact between actants moving past and through one another at different speeds. Offering a feminist account of the pliability or softness of matter, Poetics of Liveliness reads as an incipient, emergent organism in its own right, slowly and recursively proceeding by multiplying surfaces of responsiveness. -- Anne-Lise François, author of Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted ExperiencePoetics of Liveliness has two muses. One, Gertrude Stein, is named; the other, William Blake, is the “unnamed form” animating this book of wonders. Meshing handwork to brainwork, Blake’s multimedia inventions release from “the merely natural” a body of knowledge—and knowledge of bodies—that is larger, more minutely organized, and more alive than our philosophy had dreamt of. Smailbegović proves herself a member of Blake’s tribe, not just its ethnographer. Her study addresses poetry and poetics, new and old ontology, science, technology, and media studies, and ecopoetics. -- Marjorie Levinson, author of Thinking Through Poetry: Field Reports on Romantic LyricSmailbegovic’s book serves as connective tissue between a scientific treatment of literature and a deeper consideration of what it means to think with the nonhuman in all scales and on all levels of sentience. * ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment *Poetics of Liveliness is an essential read for anyone who’s interested in the connections between science and literature, and in the tremendous potential they hold for the future of critical theory and for its immediate present. * Textual Practice *[A] valuable and original contribution to interdisciplinary studies . . . it will be appealing not only to literary scholars, but also to a broader audience of philosophers, ecologists, new materialists, and possibly even to the scientific community, from entomologists to physicists. Because of its strong theoretical foundations, Poetics of Liveliness will surely act as a catalyst for future inquiries into the study of material ecologies. * H-Environment, H-Net Reviews *Poetics of Liveliness operates . . . scalarly, moves fluidly between the realms of the very small and the very large, revealing relationships between multifaceted, nonhuman material assemblages, while Smailbegović’s expertise in a variety of scientific fields buttresses the author’s ability to build the necessary information networks as she moves through the diverse levels of those relationships. * Jacket2 *For readers intrigued by the material turn (and its discontents), and no less for readers curious about what lies at the forefront of materialist-poetic experimentation today, Poetics of Liveliness should not be missed. * American Literary History *[Smailbegović's] project is to break down reified discourses of materiality by means of a poetics as lively as the nonhuman things it describes, or decorates. It is a significant, serious, yet playful account of how, in the hands of these poet-naturalists, metaphor can be used strategically to liberate readers and their reading matter alike. * Modernism/modernity *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsPart I: Textures of Change Introduction: Poetic Cosmologies1. Soft Matter2. Poetry and SciencePart II: Poetic Laboratories of Matter 3. Molecules: From Code to Shape4. Fibers: Edge Textures and Nonhuman Scales of Sense5. Tissues: Histological Landscapes and the Substances of Character6. Clouds: Cloud-Writing and the Movement of QualitiesCoda: Toward a Haptic PoeticsNotesWorks CitedIndex
£76.00
Columbia University Press Poetics of Liveliness
Book SynopsisAda Smailbegović shows how twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers have intermingled scientific methodologies with poetic form to reveal unfolding processes of change. Poetics of Liveliness moves across scales to explore the realms of molecules, fibers, tissues, and clouds.Trade ReviewIn a remarkable feat of interdisciplinary scholarship, this book plumbs the depths and scans the horizons of what it means to write on, in, of, and with “life” through a poetry and poetics of experimentation. Science meets poetry meets the ongoing unknown in a redefinition of environmental poetics—bravo! -- Cary Wolfe, author of Ecological Poetics; or, Wallace Stevens’s BirdsSmailbegović addresses the entwined relations between contemporary North American poetry and developments in philosophy, art, and science. She argues that each of these fields or practices address the same kinds of complexity in the world, both enabling language to emerge from the world (whether in human or animal form) and materiality to complexify and elaborate itself chemically and evolutionarily. -- Elizabeth Grosz, author of The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of MaterialismWriting as a poet versed in biology, physics, and meteorology, Smailbegović explains minute and slow-moving material phenomena as acutely as she does poetic nuance. Rather than unveil worlds normally imperceptible at human scale, her “edge work” tracks partial contact between actants moving past and through one another at different speeds. Offering a feminist account of the pliability or softness of matter, Poetics of Liveliness reads as an incipient, emergent organism in its own right, slowly and recursively proceeding by multiplying surfaces of responsiveness. -- Anne-Lise François, author of Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted ExperiencePoetics of Liveliness has two muses. One, Gertrude Stein, is named; the other, William Blake, is the “unnamed form” animating this book of wonders. Meshing handwork to brainwork, Blake’s multimedia inventions release from “the merely natural” a body of knowledge—and knowledge of bodies—that is larger, more minutely organized, and more alive than our philosophy had dreamt of. Smailbegović proves herself a member of Blake’s tribe, not just its ethnographer. Her study addresses poetry and poetics, new and old ontology, science, technology, and media studies, and ecopoetics. -- Marjorie Levinson, author of Thinking Through Poetry: Field Reports on Romantic LyricSmailbegovic’s book serves as connective tissue between a scientific treatment of literature and a deeper consideration of what it means to think with the nonhuman in all scales and on all levels of sentience. * ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment *Poetics of Liveliness is an essential read for anyone who’s interested in the connections between science and literature, and in the tremendous potential they hold for the future of critical theory and for its immediate present. * Textual Practice *[A] valuable and original contribution to interdisciplinary studies . . . it will be appealing not only to literary scholars, but also to a broader audience of philosophers, ecologists, new materialists, and possibly even to the scientific community, from entomologists to physicists. Because of its strong theoretical foundations, Poetics of Liveliness will surely act as a catalyst for future inquiries into the study of material ecologies. * H-Environment, H-Net Reviews *Poetics of Liveliness operates . . . scalarly, moves fluidly between the realms of the very small and the very large, revealing relationships between multifaceted, nonhuman material assemblages, while Smailbegović’s expertise in a variety of scientific fields buttresses the author’s ability to build the necessary information networks as she moves through the diverse levels of those relationships. * Jacket2 *For readers intrigued by the material turn (and its discontents), and no less for readers curious about what lies at the forefront of materialist-poetic experimentation today, Poetics of Liveliness should not be missed. * American Literary History *[Smailbegović's] project is to break down reified discourses of materiality by means of a poetics as lively as the nonhuman things it describes, or decorates. It is a significant, serious, yet playful account of how, in the hands of these poet-naturalists, metaphor can be used strategically to liberate readers and their reading matter alike. * Modernism/modernity *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsPart I: Textures of Change Introduction: Poetic Cosmologies1. Soft Matter2. Poetry and SciencePart II: Poetic Laboratories of Matter 3. Molecules: From Code to Shape4. Fibers: Edge Textures and Nonhuman Scales of Sense5. Tissues: Histological Landscapes and the Substances of Character6. Clouds: Cloud-Writing and the Movement of QualitiesCoda: Toward a Haptic PoeticsNotesWorks CitedIndex
£23.75
Columbia University Press Storythinking
Book SynopsisThis book explains how and why our brains think in stories. Angus Fletcher, an expert in neuroscientific approaches to narrative, identifies this capacity as “storythinking.”Trade ReviewFletcher’s done it again. His polymathic erudition and word-wizardry elegance pull off the equivalent of a Copernican revolution in our understanding of storytelling—in all its resplendent iterations. With Storythinking he invites us on an extraordinary odyssey that enriches understanding of our deep, instinctive impulse to create stories as makers and transformers of our world. Storythinking is nothing less than a cosmological paradigm shift that puts story making and thinking at the center of all that we do. -- Frederick Luis Aldama, award-winning author and Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, UT AustinAngus Fletcher explains why effective narrative prioritizes the unique, shifts viewpoints, and encourages conflict. Not for their own sake. It makes a writer create and clarify more thoughtful ideas and leads readers to intuit and retain the message. Both revelatory and pragmatic, and so gracefully explained. -- Shane Greenstein, author of How the Internet Became Commercial: Innovation, Privatization, and the Birth of a New NetworkStorythinking is absolutely excellent: a much-needed reminder of and expansion on the transformative power of story, story as an enriched form of learning and as a valid epistemology. The book is a lovely, readable addition to academic and public life. I am eager to see the use of story resurrected! -- Lisa Miller, Ph.D., Professor & Founder, Spirituality Mind Body Institute, Teachers College, Columbia UniversityStory is a basic mental operation. Most of our experience, knowledge, and thinking is formed and organized by story: prediction, evaluation, planning, explanation, agents and actors, processes, goals. Story is an indispensable element of creativity. Human beings project from story to story and blend stories to create new concepts, new proposals, new science. How can we push the cognitive science of story forward? Fletcher, in this captivating and inspiring new book, leads the way. -- Mark Turner, author of The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and LanguageThe quickest way to elicit a scoff from 'serious thinkers' is to mention 'story'. But as someone who has built a career as a science communicator, who consistently straddles the line between art and science, and whose work is grounded in neuroscience, I know intuitively that storytelling is fundamental to how we think. Finally, Angus Fletcher brings his deep understanding of narrative together with his keen scientific mind to explain why we think in stories, why embracing story structure is the way forward, and how stories provide an architecture to thought as powerful and important as logic. Read this book. -- Indre Viskontas, Cognitive Neuroscientist, University of San Francisco[Storythinking] is a most unusual book, plumbing the depths of history to find where philosophy went off the rails, examining neurobiology for insight into creativity, and festooned with stories about great characters all the way through. I can honestly report I’ve never read anything like it. And that’s a good thing. * The Straight Dope *Table of Contents1. Story2. Story and Thinking3. The Origin of Story4. Why Our Schools Teach Logic, Not Story5. The Limits of Logic—or Why We Still Need Storythinking6. The Brain Machinery of Storythinking7. Improving Storythinking8. Storythinking for Personal Growth9. Storythinking for Social Growth10. Story’s Answer to the Meaning of LifeCoda: Conversations with a StorythinkerNotesIndex
£67.20
Columbia University Press Tone
Book SynopsisTone is a collaborative study of literary tone, exploring its implications for community, politics, and ecology.Trade ReviewA "Most Anticipated" Book of 2023 * The Millions *Just as the world laments the apparent lack of insightful literary criticism as well as the dwindling number of venues that support it, here comes the dazzling Committee to Investigate Atmosphere with a piece of criticism like no other. Writing collaboratively and in luscious, piercing dialogue with students and peers, Kate Zambreno and Sofia Samatar set out to interrogate the question of tone from every angle imaginable: what it is or might be, how it wraps around the human and non-human, how it affects work and space, rooting readers in territories through specific prepositions; why it has proclivity for windows and community. Reading thickly and in context a to-die-for selection of contemporary creative and theoretical works—including, lo and behold, texts in translation—the Committee reminds us that often we read books less for plot, character or setting, and more for the quality of atmosphere, seeking—quite simply and quite momentously—to “breathe that air again.” -- Cristina Rivera Garza, author of Grieving and The Taiga SyndromeThis book is a gorgeous inventory of baroque intensities, spooked consciousnesses, vibrational affectivities, and shifting moods—written in and through precarity’s duration. The Committee has convened to remind us, in shimmering and intricate prose, that all thinking is collective thinking. In the doorway of thought: a ‘we’ steps into the weather of literature. -- Jackie Wang, author of Carceral Capitalism and The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the VoidIn this subtle, haunting study, "the Committee" investigates what it means to write both of and on the cloud. Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno gave themselves over to the nebulous space of a collective reading and writing practice, seeking neither plot nor character, but rather that most indefinable of literary qualities: tone. Joining them there is eerily calming: "Someone else has entered the chat. And so here we are." After three years of constant, anxious reminders that we are breathing each other's air, try as we might to remain particular, there is something immensely gratifying about surrendering to this pronoun of our plural, historical intimacy. -- Barbara Browning, author of The Gift and The MiniaturistsA lyrical, erudite meditation. * Kirkus Reviews *An insightful, playful, and unique book of creative criticism . . . Tone is a beautiful book of conjecture: a fine, long essay in the tradition of William Gass's On Being Blue. -- Nick Ripatrazone * Image Journal *[This] book will be a vital resource for imagining the future of creative work in the 21st century. -- Safa Khatib * The Markaz Review *In book reviews, a translation’s tone is as frequently complimented as it is criticized, and most often, little more about the translation is said. We all know what we mean by tone, right? This is why the Committee’s intervention is so vital: they are starting from scratch; and they are starting by scratching, rubbing, relating, touching, tending. They are reading and repeating: the blue you see is not the same blue that I see; I hear you differently than you want to be heard; my nose, my room, my furniture, my language is not the same as yours. -- Claire Foster * ARCADE *[This] book is a paradigm for how theory gets written now: in merged voices, as if courting disorientation, through unpredictable leaps of subject matter, and with a constant reference to ambient collective experience, all fusing into an anti-mastery with a nostalgia for impossible mastery. The tone of our moment, let’s say. And tones, Samatar and Zambreno demonstrate, have moments. -- Nicholas Dames * Public Books *Table of Contents1. Front Matter, or The Zone of Our Mutual Sensitivity2. Fog, or A Gradual Accumulation3. The Wasteland, or Our Own Colorless Patch of Sky4. Hoard, or An Unaired Room5. Aviary, or Animal6. Guest Lecture, or Reports to an Academy7. Lighted Window, or Studies in AtmosphereAcknowledgmentsNotes
£54.40
Columbia University Press Tone
Book SynopsisTone is a collaborative study of literary tone, exploring its implications for community, politics, and ecology.Trade ReviewA "Most Anticipated" Book of 2023 * The Millions *Just as the world laments the apparent lack of insightful literary criticism as well as the dwindling number of venues that support it, here comes the dazzling Committee to Investigate Atmosphere with a piece of criticism like no other. Writing collaboratively and in luscious, piercing dialogue with students and peers, Kate Zambreno and Sofia Samatar set out to interrogate the question of tone from every angle imaginable: what it is or might be, how it wraps around the human and non-human, how it affects work and space, rooting readers in territories through specific prepositions; why it has proclivity for windows and community. Reading thickly and in context a to-die-for selection of contemporary creative and theoretical works—including, lo and behold, texts in translation—the Committee reminds us that often we read books less for plot, character or setting, and more for the quality of atmosphere, seeking—quite simply and quite momentously—to “breathe that air again.” -- Cristina Rivera Garza, author of Grieving and The Taiga SyndromeThis book is a gorgeous inventory of baroque intensities, spooked consciousnesses, vibrational affectivities, and shifting moods—written in and through precarity’s duration. The Committee has convened to remind us, in shimmering and intricate prose, that all thinking is collective thinking. In the doorway of thought: a ‘we’ steps into the weather of literature. -- Jackie Wang, author of Carceral Capitalism and The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the VoidIn this subtle, haunting study, "the Committee" investigates what it means to write both of and on the cloud. Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno gave themselves over to the nebulous space of a collective reading and writing practice, seeking neither plot nor character, but rather that most indefinable of literary qualities: tone. Joining them there is eerily calming: "Someone else has entered the chat. And so here we are." After three years of constant, anxious reminders that we are breathing each other's air, try as we might to remain particular, there is something immensely gratifying about surrendering to this pronoun of our plural, historical intimacy. -- Barbara Browning, author of The Gift and The MiniaturistsA lyrical, erudite meditation. * Kirkus Reviews *An insightful, playful, and unique book of creative criticism . . . Tone is a beautiful book of conjecture: a fine, long essay in the tradition of William Gass's On Being Blue. -- Nick Ripatrazone * Image Journal *[This] book will be a vital resource for imagining the future of creative work in the 21st century. -- Safa Khatib * The Markaz Review *In book reviews, a translation’s tone is as frequently complimented as it is criticized, and most often, little more about the translation is said. We all know what we mean by tone, right? This is why the Committee’s intervention is so vital: they are starting from scratch; and they are starting by scratching, rubbing, relating, touching, tending. They are reading and repeating: the blue you see is not the same blue that I see; I hear you differently than you want to be heard; my nose, my room, my furniture, my language is not the same as yours. -- Claire Foster * ARCADE *[This] book is a paradigm for how theory gets written now: in merged voices, as if courting disorientation, through unpredictable leaps of subject matter, and with a constant reference to ambient collective experience, all fusing into an anti-mastery with a nostalgia for impossible mastery. The tone of our moment, let’s say. And tones, Samatar and Zambreno demonstrate, have moments. -- Nicholas Dames * Public Books *Table of Contents1. Front Matter, or The Zone of Our Mutual Sensitivity2. Fog, or A Gradual Accumulation3. The Wasteland, or Our Own Colorless Patch of Sky4. Hoard, or An Unaired Room5. Aviary, or Animal6. Guest Lecture, or Reports to an Academy7. Lighted Window, or Studies in AtmosphereAcknowledgmentsNotes
£15.29
University of Illinois Press The Flowers of Tarbes
Book SynopsisProbes the relationship between language, meaning, context, intention and action, and produces a treatise on the nature of the literary act, and a meditation on the responsibility or ethical imperative of literature itself. This book is the English translation of "Les Fleurs de Tarbes, ou la terreur dans les lettres".
£27.90
University of Illinois Press Loser Sons
Book SynopsisDraws on current philosophy, literary history, and political events to confront the grim fact that divested boys become terrifying men.Trade Review "The area of literature, politics and economics is a growing interdisciplinary field of study. Avital Ronell's new book is an important contribution to this newly evolving aspect of literary theory...Ronell has written a beautiful and timely book in support of the highly underrated and immeasurable zero position."--Political Studies Review "Important contribution ... a beautiful and timely book."--Political Theory"In addition to its importance for the ongoing readers of Ronell's work, this book will be automatically a requirement in the field of study of authority. A beautifully written and composed study that sets new highest standards."--Laurence A. Rickels, author of Aberrations of Mourning: Writings on German Crypts"Loser Sons will endear and fascinate the theoretically curious and will speak to intellectually and politically adventurous audiences. A welcome intervention in the art of political physiognomy and progressive seismography, both redeemed from their most violent and delusional of expectations."--Hent de Vries, editor of Religion: Beyond a Concept "Important contribution. . . . a beautiful and timely book."--Political Theory
£19.94
Indiana University Press The Materiality of Language Gender Politics and
Book SynopsisLanguage is understood as a key path in the formation of all social and political relationsTrade ReviewThe scope and depth of Bleich's work in The Materiality of Language are impressive. This book offers intriguing views of historical developments in language philosophies, the ways in which rigid views of language have supported institutional hegemony and androcentrism, and the positive implications of acknowledging language's materiality. The systematic links he draws among language, gender, institutions, and politics offer generative insights that will certainly be of interest to scholars in rhetoric and composition. * Rhetoric Review *[The author's] thesis is interesting and provocative. He argues forcefully for the relevance of language, construed as a material entity, across a wide range of disciplines (and to life in general), and challenges the focus on treating language as a cognitive phenomenon and studying it in abstract terms.11/7/13 * New Books in Language *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Contested SubjectPart One: The Materiality of LanguageChapter 1: Premises and Backgrounds Chapter 2: Received Standards in the Study of Language Chapter 3: Materiality and Genre Chapter 4: The Unity of Language and Thought Chapter 5: Materiality and the Contemporary Study of Language Chapter 6: Recognizing Politics in the Study of Language Part Two: Language in the UniversityChapter 7: Frustrations of Academic Language Chapter 8: The Protected Institution Chapter 9: The Sacred Language Chapter 10: Language Uses in Science, the Heir of Latin Chapter 11: Language and Human Survival Chapter 12: The Materiality of Literature and the Contested Subject Works Cited and ConsultedIndex
£19.05
Indiana University Press What Is Fiction For Literary Humanism Restored
Book SynopsisHow can literature, which consists of nothing more than the description of imaginary events and situations, offer any insight into the workings of "human reality" or "the human condition"? Can mere words illuminate something that we call "reality"? This book answers these questions.Trade ReviewWhat Is Fiction For? Literary Humanism Restored brings the disciplines of literature and philosophy to bear on a single subject: the necessity of humane letters in education, the capacity of literature to transform and elevate the mind. * Academic Questions *The book is wide ranging and deeply engaged with a broad range of theoretical perspectives. . . . Recommended. * Choice *This book is not an easy read, but the effort is rewarding since its argument may very well represent a cornerstone in the history of ideas. It can certainly be a cornerstone of one's career: if one is a student in the humanities and has not yet developed needed certainties, this book can provide the grounding needed to develop them. The book's ideas are stoically, logically, and brilliantly defended. . . . Harrison's account ultimately defines itself as mandatory reading for anyone concerned with literature and literary humanism. * Partial Answers *One great virtue of the book is that Harrison's marriage of philosophy and literary criticism does genuine and novel work. It takes someone of Harrison's philosophical training to articulate the theoretical basis for his defense of literary humanism, and it takes his gifts as a critic to show what this humanism looks like in practice. * Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism *All those who care about literature, including admirers of the New Criticism, are indebted to Bernard Harrison for demonstrating, at length and in painstaking theoretical detail, the philosophical validity for the twenty-first century of 'merely what every common reader has always taken to be involved in ''talking about books.''' * The Weekly Standard *In What Is Fiction For? Harrison makes a strong case for the ongoing relevance of the study of iterature as a serious and worthwhile intellectual pursuit. * Eighteenth-Century Fiction *[A] hugely original and rich defence of literary humanism. . . . I think this book, and Harrison's library cognitivism more broadly, deserves more attention . . . . * British Journal of Aesthetics *Table of ContentsPrefaceIntroductionPART I: Getting Real1. Humanism and its Discontents2. The Mirror of Nature3. Truth, Meaning and Reality4. Leavis and Wittgenstein (I): A Living Language5. Leavis and Wittgenstein (II): The "Third Realm"PART II: Character, Language and Human Worlds6. Nature and Artifice7. Virginia Woolf and "The True Reality"8. Aharon Appelfeld and the Problem of Holocaust Fiction9. The Limits of Authorial License in Our Mutual FriendPART III: Against "The Meaning of the Work"10. Reactive versus Interpretive Criticism11. Houyhnhnm Virtue12. Sterne and SentimentalismPART IV: The Skeptic Side13. Reanimating the Author14. Persons and Narratives15. Reading and Reading-In16. Meaning It Literally: Derrida and his Critics RevisitedEpilogue: Telling the Great from the GoodNotesBibliographyIndex
£63.00
Indiana University Press What Is Fiction For
Book SynopsisHow can literature, which consists of nothing more than the description of imaginary events and situations, offer any insight into the workings of "human reality" or "the human condition"? Can mere words illuminate something that we call "reality"? This book answers these questions.Trade ReviewWhat Is Fiction For? Literary Humanism Restored brings the disciplines of literature and philosophy to bear on a single subject: the necessity of humane letters in education, the capacity of literature to transform and elevate the mind. * Academic Questions *The book is wide ranging and deeply engaged with a broad range of theoretical perspectives. . . . Recommended. * Choice *This book is not an easy read, but the effort is rewarding since its argument may very well represent a cornerstone in the history of ideas. It can certainly be a cornerstone of one's career: if one is a student in the humanities and has not yet developed needed certainties, this book can provide the grounding needed to develop them. The book's ideas are stoically, logically, and brilliantly defended. . . . Harrison's account ultimately defines itself as mandatory reading for anyone concerned with literature and literary humanism. * Partial Answers *One great virtue of the book is that Harrison's marriage of philosophy and literary criticism does genuine and novel work. It takes someone of Harrison's philosophical training to articulate the theoretical basis for his defense of literary humanism, and it takes his gifts as a critic to show what this humanism looks like in practice. * Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism *All those who care about literature, including admirers of the New Criticism, are indebted to Bernard Harrison for demonstrating, at length and in painstaking theoretical detail, the philosophical validity for the twenty-first century of 'merely what every common reader has always taken to be involved in ''talking about books.''' * The Weekly Standard *In What Is Fiction For? Harrison makes a strong case for the ongoing relevance of the study of iterature as a serious and worthwhile intellectual pursuit. * Eighteenth-Century Fiction *[A] hugely original and rich defence of literary humanism. . . . I think this book, and Harrison's library cognitivism more broadly, deserves more attention . . . . * British Journal of Aesthetics *Table of ContentsPrefaceIntroductionPART I: Getting Real1. Humanism and its Discontents2. The Mirror of Nature3. Truth, Meaning and Reality4. Leavis and Wittgenstein (I): A Living Language5. Leavis and Wittgenstein (II): The "Third Realm"PART II: Character, Language and Human Worlds6. Nature and Artifice7. Virginia Woolf and "The True Reality"8. Aharon Appelfeld and the Problem of Holocaust Fiction9. The Limits of Authorial License in Our Mutual FriendPART III: Against "The Meaning of the Work"10. Reactive versus Interpretive Criticism11. Houyhnhnm Virtue12. Sterne and SentimentalismPART IV: The Skeptic Side13. Reanimating the Author14. Persons and Narratives15. Reading and Reading-In16. Meaning It Literally: Derrida and his Critics RevisitedEpilogue: Telling the Great from the GoodNotesBibliographyIndex
£25.19
Indiana University Press Imagined Landscapes
Book SynopsisTrade Review"It will likely be the indispensable touchstone for any future work in these areas with respect to Australian cultural studies." -Robert T. Tally, Texas State University "Definitely original in its approach, since it combines a conceptual approach with a more applied one. The book is a serious contribution to the field of mapping spatial narratives and to a better understanding of the production and spatial structure of fictional places." -Sebastien Caquard, Concordia UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction: Geocriticism's Disciplinary BoundariesAcknowledgments1. Remediating Space: Adaptation and Narrative Geography2. Cultural Topography and Mythic Space: Australia's North as Gothic Space3. Spatial History: Mapping Narrative Perceptions of Place over Time4. Mobility and Travel Narratives: Geovisualizing the Cultural Politics of Belonging to the Land5. Terra Incognita: Mapping the Uncertain and the UnknownBibliographyIndex
£59.50
MH - Indiana University Press Interpreting Musical Gestures Topics and Tropes
Book SynopsisTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I. Markedness, Topics, and Tropes1. Semiotic Grounding in Markedness and Style: Interpreting a Style Type in the Opening of Beethoven's Ghost Trio, Op. 70, no. 12. Expressive Doubling, Topics, Tropes, and Shifts in Level of Discourse: Interpreting the Third Movement of Beethoven's String Quartet in B-flat Major, Op. 1303. From Topic to Premise and Mode: The Pastoral in Schubert's Piano Sonata in G Major, D. 8944. The Troping of Topics, Genres, and Forms: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Bruckner, MahlerPart II. Musical GestureIntroduction to Part II5. Foundational Principles of Human Gesture6. Toward a Theory of Musical Gesture7. Stylistic Types and Strategic Functions of Gestures8. Thematic Gesture in Schubert: The Piano Sonatas in A Major, D. 959, and A Minor, D. 7849. Thematic Gesture in Beethoven: Sonata for Piano and Cello in C Major, Op. 102, no. 110. Gestural Troping and AgencyConclusion to Part IIPart III. Continuity and DiscontinuityIntroduction to Part III11. From Gestural Continuity to Continuity as Premise12. Discontinuity and BeyondConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex of Names and WorksIndex of Concepts
£999.99
Indiana University Press Pinks Pansies and Punks
Book SynopsisA cultural history of macho criticismTrade ReviewExhaustively researched and meticulously detailed, James Penner's [book] cuts an insightful swath through fifty years of 20th century macho literary criticism . . . Scholars, historians, and culture critics will have much to chew on here. May 2011 * Reno Tahoe Tonight *With a literary fluid style and a pleasant wit, Penner steers the reader through five decades of fluctuating visions of masculinity, not only in novels and criticism, but also in various artistic endeavors and in 'cultured society' as a whole. ...[A]n invaluable book.8/22/11 * GRAAT *A nice addition to the steadily lengthening shelf of literary gender studies, this perceptive, well-researched volume ... surveys a vast landscape of eclectic literary achievement: from hypermasculine warrior myths, anticommunist crusades, and the New Critics to Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, and William S. Burroughs ... [this] study merits a long look. Summing Up: Highly recommendedJuly 2011 * Choice *Pinks, Pansies, and Punks offers an indispensable text that compellingly theorizes the significance of masculinity's role in literary culture and the twentieth-century social contexts that shaped—and were shaped by—it. * Twentieth Century Literature *All in all it [Pinks, Pansies, and Punks] is a recommendable, as informative introduction to the American culture and Gendergeschichte [gender studies] of the middle twentieth century. * Orbis Litterarum *Penner's study is an ambitious and provocative look at mid-century delineations of masculinity in American literary culture. . . . [It] asks readers to reconsider and expand the horizons of their understanding of twentieth-century male identity, and to reflect on their critical efforts to fit writers, artists, and other critics into specific categories and definitions. In many ways, this is what makes it such a rich and potentially valuable a contribution not only to masculinity and gender studies, but to American literary and cultural studies as well. * College Literature *In compelling ways, Penner navigates through layered textual materials to show how multiple configurations of masculinity can and do co-exist . . . This book proves a very interesting study for those interested in Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, or Literary Criticism. Vol. 40:6 * Women's Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: A Short History of Macho Criticism1. "Healthy Nerves and Sturdy Physiques": Remaking the Male Body of Literary Culture in the 1930s2. Doughfaces, Eggheads, and Softies: Gendered Epithets and American Literary Culture in the 1940s3. Highbrows and Lowbrows: Squares, Beats, Hipsters, White Negroes, New Critics, and American Literary Culture in the 1950s4. Reforming the Hard Body: The Old Left, the Counterculture, and the Masculine Kulturkampf of the 1960s5. The Gender Upheavals of the Late 1960s and Early 1970s: The Black Panthers, Gay Liberation, and Radical FeminismEpilogue: The End of InnuendoNotesBibliographyIndex
£20.89
Indiana University Press The Semiotics of Performance
Book SynopsisDiscusses the possibilities of real theatrical performances: a project which is an unavoidable challenge for a semiotics of theatre. The author develops a systematic definition of performance in terms of text, a new theoretical object, which he sees as the result of treating theatrical performance as a material object.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Theater Or Semiotics0.1. The Textual Analysis of Performance0.2. From Structuralism to the Pragmatics of the Text0.3. Enunciation, Intertextuality, and Reception0.4. Textual Analysis as a Multidisciplinary Approach0.5. Epistemological Limits0.6. Semiotics and TheaterOne. Dramatic Text and Mise-en-Scene1.1. Reasons for a Misunderstanding1.2. A Critique of the Conception of the Dramatic Text as a "Constant" or "Deep Structure" of Performance1.3. Language and Metalanguage, Text and Metatext1.4. Virtual Mise-en-Scene and Real Mise-en-Scene1.4.1. The Residue-Text: A Particular Case?1.5. The Irreversibility of Theatrical Transcoding1.6. Toward a Definition of the Dramatic Genre1.7. Dramatic Discourse1.8. The Dramatic Text as "Instructions for Use"Two. The Performance Text2.1. Performance as Text2.2. Theatrical Performance: A Definition2.2.1. Technical Reproducibility, Repeatability, Duplicatability2.2.2. Theater and Everyday Life2.3. Completeness and Coherence of the Performance Text2.3.1. The Delimitation of the Performance Text2.3.2. Levels of Coherence in the Performance Text2.4 The Performance Text: Between Presence and Absence2.4.1. "Present" Performances and "Absent" Performances2.4.2. Ruffini: Contextual Restoration2.4.3. Description/Transcription2.5. The Double Heterogeneity of the Performance Text2.6. Performance Texts Shorter or Longer than One Performance2.6.1. Partial Texts and Segments of the Performance Text2.6.2 Groups and Classes of Performance Texts2.7. Co-textual and Contextual AspectsThree. The Textual Structure of Performance3.1. Multiple Systems and Single Systems3.2. Degrees of Dynamism in the Textual Structure of Performance3.3. Partial Structures and Macrostructures3.4. Multiple Interpretations, Multiple Structures3.5. Analysis/Reading/CriticismFour. Performance Codes and Theatrical Conventions4.1. The Concept of "Code" in Relation to Theatrical Performance4.2. Decoding, Comprehension, Interpretation4.3. Classification according to Codes and Classification according to Expressive Material4.4. Theatrical and Nontheatrical Meanings4.5. Performance Codes (in the Strict Sense)4.6. Theatrical Conventions4.6.1 General Conventions4.6.2. Particular conventions4.6.3. Distinctive Conventions4.6.4. Notes and Observations on the Proposed Classification4.7. The Performance Text as an Example of Invention4.7.1. Transformation and Institution of the Code4.7.2. The Performance Text as an Aesthetic TextFive. Performance Text, Cultural Context, and Intertextual Practices5.1. The Performance Text in the Genral Test: The Cultural Roots of Codes and Conventions5.2. Aesthetic and Nonaesthetic Codes: From Culture to Art and Back5.3. Francastel: The Aesthetic Text as Montage of Cultural Objects5.3.1. The Example of the Mythological Festival5.4. Types of Theatrical IntertextualitySix. Toward a Pragmatics of Theatrical Communication6.1. The Performance Context6.2. Communication in the Theater6.3. The Kind and Degree of Communication in Performance6.4. Theatrical Manipulation6.5. Action/Fiction: The Performance Test as a Macro-Speech Act6.6. Theater Beyond Simulation and NegationSeven. The Spectator's Task7.1. The Current State of Research on Theatrical Reception7.2. Research on Reception outside of Theater7.2.1. The Konstanz School and "Rezeptionsasthetik"7.2.2 T.A. van Dijk and W. Kintsch: The Cognitive Processes of Discourse Comprehension7.3. The Model Spectator: "Closed" Spectators and "Open" Spectators7.4. Theatrical Competence7.5. Theatrical Genre as a Textual Type7.6. Pragmatic Aspects of Theatrical Genres7.7. Avant-Garde Theater as Metalinguistic Manipulation of the Performance Context7.8. Grammaticality, Acceptability, and Appropriateness of the Performance TextNotesBibliography
£40.50
Indiana University Press Is Language a Music
Book SynopsisIf music is a universal language, is language a universal music?Trade ReviewDavid Lidov's new book is highly recommended. . . Not only has Lidov's collection of essays established a secure base in the imposing terrain associated with the study of musical signification, but it also has laid some vital programmatic depots over that terrain that will aid future treks across the rugged musico-semiotic landscape. 31.2 Fall 2009 * Music Theory Spectrum *Table of Contents Foreword 1. Prelude-Is Language a Music?Part I. Structuralist Pespectives-Introduction 2. Structure and Function in Repetition. 3. The Allegretto of Beethoven's Seventh. 4. Mediation as a Formal Principle in Music: Three Examples.Part II. Semiotic Polemics-Introduction 5. Nattiez's Fondements. 6. Our Time with Druids. 7. Why We Still Need Peirce.Part III. From Gestures to Discourses-Introduction 8. Mind and Body in Music. 9. Opera Operta: Realism and Rehabilitation in La Traviata 10. A Monument in Song: Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee by Beverley (Buffy) St. Marie.Part IV. The Messages of Methods-Introduction 11. Bartok the Progessive.12. The Art of Music Theory and the Aesthetic Category of the Possible13. Technique and Signification in the Twelve-Tone Method14. The Project of Abstraction in Painting and Music.Part V. Resisting Representation-Introduction 15. Replaying my Voice MailNotesReferencesIndex
£29.45
Indiana University Press Interpreting Musical Gestures Topics and Trope
Book SynopsisA study of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert by an award-winning author.Trade Review"Robert Hatten's new book is a worthy successor to his Musical Meaning in Beethoven, which established him as a front-rank scholar ... in questions of musical meaning... Both how he approaches musical works and what he says about them are timely and to the point. Musical scholars in both musicology and theory will find much of value here, and will find their notions of musical meaning challenged and expanded." oPatrick McCrelessTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I. Markedness, Topics, and Tropes1. Semiotic Grounding in Markedness and Style: Interpreting a Style Type in the Opening of Beethoven's Ghost Trio, Op. 70, no. 12. Expressive Doubling, Topics, Tropes, and Shifts in Level of Discourse: Interpreting the Third Movement of Beethoven's String Quartet in B-flat Major, Op. 1303. From Topic to Premise and Mode: The Pastoral in Schubert's Piano Sonata in G Major, D. 8944. The Troping of Topics, Genres, and Forms: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Bruckner, MahlerPart II. Musical GestureIntroduction to Part II5. Foundational Principles of Human Gesture6. Toward a Theory of Musical Gesture7. Stylistic Types and Strategic Functions of Gestures8. Thematic Gesture in Schubert: The Piano Sonatas in A Major, D. 959, and A Minor, D. 7849. Thematic Gesture in Beethoven: Sonata for Piano and Cello in C Major, Op. 102, no. 110. Gestural Troping and AgencyConclusion to Part IIPart III. Continuity and DiscontinuityIntroduction to Part III11. From Gestural Continuity to Continuity as Premise12. Discontinuity and BeyondConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex of Names and WorksIndex of Concepts
£35.15
University of Notre Dame Press Neighboring Text
Book SynopsisThe Neighboring Text uses recent work in psychoanalysis and political philosophy to examine the figure of Troilus in three major works of medieval literature.Trade Review"George Edmondson has authored a major intervention into medieval cultural studies. A brilliant work of criticism, The Neighboring Text reconfigures how to think about textual relations, opening a space where meanings unfold through contiguity rather than filiation of influence. The book deploys a historically sensitive psychoanalytic mode of analysis that foregrounds the place of the ethical within literary analysis." —Jeffrey J. Cohen, George Washington University"George Edmondson's book marks an innovative and promising approach to the Chaucerian tradition of Trojan historical fiction. This is an incredibly smart and compelling book. Its central idea about reconfiguring genealogical relations between texts into 'neighbor' relations that can complicate the normally linear ideas of cause-effect-revision extends our historical understanding of medieval texts and invigorates a field that threatens to become a rigid and stultified scene of reading." —Elizabeth Scala, University of Texas, Austin"This is the most important recent reconfiguration of medieval English literary history. Edmondson’s book reanimates both a rigorous psychoanalytic method and the question of what Chaucer did to Il Filostrato. It demonstrates not only that Boccaccio, Chaucer, Henryson, C. S. Lewis, David Wallace, and Aranye Fradenburg belong in the same neighborhood but that its smart and urgent thinking about what it means to be a neighbor could open valuable new real estate in medieval literary studies generally." —D. Vance Smith, Princeton University“Edmondson (Dartmouth) has written an exemplary study of literary relations of the late Middle Ages. . . . The book is well grounded in psychoanalytic theory, yet Edmondson’s prose is conversational and clear, which is refreshing. The book also acts as a literary history of sorts . . . which is both useful and necessary. . . . This reviewer has not read such a masterful study of Henryson’s text in some time.” —Choice“The connections between Henryson and Chaucer, and then Chaucer and Boccaccio, are hard to overlook. George Edmondson’s book takes a new vantage on this well-known situation, specifically on each poet’s telling of the doomed love affair between Troilus and Criseyde.” —Renaissance Quarterly“Over thirty years ago, Richard Rorty said that ‘we are in for another few hundred years of getting adjusted to the availability of the psychoanalytic vocabulary.’ The appearance of George Edmondson’s The Neighboring Text is surely an eloquent demonstration of just how fast such adjustment is happening and how developed critical uses of this psychoanalytic vocabulary has become. In the same spirit, it is also true to say that this is surely a book ahead of its time.” —Review of English Studies“The Neighboring Text in many ways proceeds from the ground-shifting studies of historicists who work with psychoanalytic concepts, like Ingham and Aranye Fradenburg. But, making full critical use of a specialized psychoanalytic vocabulary, it also offers a new model for assessing the relations between texts in a culture in which the imperative to neighbor love was taken seriously and potentially influenced a medieval reader’s response to a text.” —Comitatus“This is a valuable contribution to the field and a book that well repays deep engagement, critique, and debate, for there is a level of erudition here that is not easy to put to one side, and which calls out for further discussion.” —Parergon“The Neighboring Text: Chaucer, Boccaccio, Henryson establishes a new way of looking at the relationship between texts, particularly the Troilus text of the three authors mentioned in the title. Moving beyond simple ideas of genealogy, Edmondson introduces the concept of neighboring and thus offers a fresh perspective on the interaction between the texts that deal with the story of Troilus and Criseyde.” —Sixteenth Century Journal“This book breaks new ground in the field of literary history. . . . [Its] originality lies in its argument that literary inventiveness is spurred not by an Oedipal relation but by ‘identification, aggression, love, charity, and the possibility of a community organized around something other than sacrifice and exchange.’ This has large implications for textual relations.” —Medium Aevum
£28.80
University of Notre Dame Press The Genius to Improve an Invention
Book SynopsisThe Genius to Improve an Invention derives its title from John Dryden's phrase for the British tendency to take up literary masterpieces from the past and perfect them. Distinguished literary scholar Piero Boitani adopts Dryden's notion as a framework for exploring ways in which classical and medieval texts, scenes, and themes have been rewritten by modern authors. Boitani focuses on a concept of literary transition that takes into account both T.S. Eliot's idea of tradition and individual talent and Harold Bloom's anxiety of influence. In five elegant essays he examines a wide range of authors and texts, including Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Voltaire, Goethe, Sartre, Dante, and Keats. Appearing for the first time in an English translation, The Genius to Improve an Invention will appeal to anyone interested in the Western literary tradition.Trade Review“The book’s linguistic vicissitudes are intriguingly appropriate to its topic, which is the (mostly) translingual commerce between literary texts in which the difference evident in imitation can be understood as an inspired improvement." -- American Journal of Philology“Boitani’s slim book more than lives up to its unique production history in the extraordinary range of its subjects and insights. It is the kind of book that great men of letters once wrote.... [The Genius to Improve an Invention], once opened, it is a book almost impossible to put down.” -- Medium Aevum“This book deserves the attention of all who are interested in the processes of literary continuity and change.” -- Frank Kermode, King’s College, Cambridge University“The Genius to Improve an Invention is both substantial and graceful–a fascinating journey through some of the greatest works of Western literature, with a guide who is at once learned and entertaining, impassioned and moving.” -- Jill Mann“The Genius to Improve an Invention is supported with a thorough theoretical awareness and a flexible intelligence enabling Boitani to move comfortably within a vast array of texts and thus take the reader on a fascinating literary journey. Through his pressing and detailed argumentations, the author suggests original approaches to some of the great works of European literature—each of them is considered as a solution to a specific problem and, at the same time, as a probative argument in favor of applied rationality. Reading these essays calls to mind what Henry James once said, ‘all the pieces of the game [are] on the table together and each unconfusedly and contributively placed, as triumphantly scientific.’” -- Mario Lavagetto, University of Bologna
£17.99
