Literary theory Books

Book SynopsisA thoroughly updated edition of the witty and engaging exploration of the history, application, and tenets of literary theory. The first edition of Ten Lessons served as a literary introduction to theoretical writing, a strong set of pedagogical prose poems unpacking Lacanian psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, Marxism, cultural studies, feminism, gender studies, and queer theory. Here Calvin Thomas returns to these ten lessons, each based on an axiomatic sentence selected from the canons of theory, each exploring the basic assumptions and motivations of theoretical writing. But while every lesson explains the working terms and core tenets of theory, each also attempts to exemplify theory as a liberatory practice (bell hooks), to liberate theory as a practice of creativity (Foucault) in and of itself. The revised, updated, and expanded second edition, featuring 25% new material, still argues for theoretical writing as a genre of creative writing, a way oTrade ReviewCalvin Thomas compellingly reminds us why theory matters. Rather than being esoteric and far removed from reality, it is the stuff of the everyday. Who we are, how we speak, what we say, and how we act are all dimensions of theory. Ten Lessons in Theory shakes up the world as we know it, and tells us why, as a popular cartoon suggests, being a theorist might be more dangerous than being a terrorist. * Madhavi Menon, Professor of English, Ashoka University, India, and author of Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India (2018) *I know of nothing else like it on the market. There is no better single-volume textbook for introducing, explaining, and engaging thoughtfully (and literarily) with conceptual ideas and the power of language to change the world. Period. * Kristen L. Over, Associate Professor of English and Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Northeastern Illinois University, USA *Calvin Thomas pulls no punches in this round two of Ten Lessons in Theory. Looking for ‘good trouble,’ Thomas goes to the mat for critical theory against its antagonists and the fearmongering, book banning, race-baiting, homophobic, anti-woman, trans-hating demagogues who will hate this book. Is literary theory political? You bet it is. But from Thomas' deft pen, theory soars invitingly. Students looking for a guide to the most exciting and challenging intellectual journey are sure to love this book. * Michael Drexler, Professor of English, Bucknell University, USA., and author of The Traumatic Colonel: the Founding Fathers, Slavery, and the Phantasmatic Aaron Burr (with Ed White, 2014) *One of the key premises in this expanded edition of Ten Lessons in Theory is that theory is fundamentally literature; it is a genre of creative writing. To that end, Thomas’ book is truly sui generis as an introduction to critical theory that performs the intellectual miracle of being both erudite and entertaining. Ten Lessons is virtuosic in its scope and reach as it tracks early theoretical developments in continental philosophy to present day critical theories of race, gender, and identity while somehow, against all odds, never feeling overwhelming or pedantic. Ten Lessons reaffirms and revitalizes the importance of critical theory as a necessary toolkit to help make meaning of our often disorienting social and political present. * Kevin Wynter, Assistant Professor of Media Studies, Pomona College, USA, and author of Critical Race Theory and Jordan Peele's Get Out (Bloomsbury, 2022) *Ten Lessons in Theory: An Introduction to Theoretical Writing is an excellent, thoughtful, and sophisticated introduction to the use of theory in critical work. Calvin Thomas encourages readers to have a better understanding of foundational theoretical texts on a fundamental level … This introduction is nuanced and holds something for everyone. * Literary Research and British Postmodernism [on the 1st edition] *Thomas’s advocacy is a spirited rhetorical performance, made more valiant when considered in the context of our distinctly post-theory climate. ... In lesser hands, this ambitious exercise might have easily ended up in a dizzying theoretical tour, rushed and routine, but Thomas develops an admirably tight narrative, marshaling vast multiplicities of often competing theories into an elegant labyrinthine argument, all the while offering sharp and fresh accounts of the different positions in question. The book would make for a perfect introduction to readers new to Theory. * Recherche littéraire/Literary Research [on the 1st edition] *[A] wide-ranging, incisive and sometimes polemical tour through contemporary literary theory ... Any student or teacher of theory who has trouble giving a sympathetic audience to psychoanalytic concepts and approaches would benefit from the first half of Thomas’s book. Thomas has a gift for not only making Lacanian psychoanalysis clear, but also for making these concepts seem virtually self-evident. ... Ten Lessons in Theory should be read widely. Thomas makes a passionate, compelling case for the work of theory, for the political purchase of a certain way of thinking and writing theoretically. He also does an exceptional job of making surprising connections across theoretical approaches and ideas. For the student who does not understand why virtually impenetrable texts are being assigned with such frequency, or why they are considered a necessary part of one’s education, Thomas’s book will not only help clear the conceptual ground, but will also give the student some sense of why grappling with complexity a density is worthwhile in the first place. * Chiasma [on the 1st edition] *This beautifully written and imaginatively conceived introduction to critical theory is effectively structured around the 'ten lessons' of the title. It offers something genuinely new by focussing in detail on the legacies of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, whose insights, while foundational to much critical theory, are all too often passed over in cursory fashion in other guides. * Lisa Downing, Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality, University of Birmingham, UK, and author of The Cambridge Introduction to Foucault [on the 1st edition] *Ten Lessons in Theory will make you fall in love with theory. And if you already are, it will make you congratulate yourself for having such a splendid beloved. No ordinary introduction to theory, Calvin Thomas's treatise is a dazzling, articulate, impassioned, and wholly convincing argument for why theory matters and should continue to matter. Through a close explication of some of theory's most famous statements, Thomas brings theoretical reasoning to life in ways that keep the reader—even the expert reader—riveted. Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud get the special attention they deserve, and Lacan animates the text the way only Lacan—when well explained—can. The next time a student complains about the ‘uselessness’ or ‘difficulty’ of theory, I'll hand them Ten Lessons in Theory. * Mari Ruti, Professor of Critical Theory, University of Toronto, Canada, and author of The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within [on the 1st edition] *Gorgeously written and compellingly argued, Calvin Thomas’s Ten Lessons in Theory provides students of all levels with a sparklingly insightful initiation into the full intellectual sweep of what is known as ‘theory’ in today’s humanities. But, in addition to this, Thomas offers even the most seasoned scholars a plethora of creative new perspectives on the past two centuries running from post-Kantian German idealism to the aftermath of ‘postmodernism.’ Ten Lessons in Theory accomplishes nothing less than a radical reconfiguration of our contemporary theoretical conjuncture through its Lacan-inspired reactivation of the more-relevant-than-ever legacies of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Everyone from undergraduates to full professors to curious lay readers has a great deal to learn from Thomas. One cannot find a surer, clearer, and more enlightening guide to this tricky intellectual terrain anywhere. * Adrian Johnston, Professor of Philosphy, University of New Mexico, USA, and author of Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity [on the 1st edition] *Table of ContentsPrologue to the Second Edition: Bad Timing, Good Trouble Preface to the Second Edition: "Something (still) worth reading": Theory and/as the Art of the Sentence Introductory Matters: What Theory Does, Why Theory Lives Part 1. Antiphysis: Five Lessons in Textual Anthropogenesis Lesson One: "The world must be made to mean"—or, in(tro)ducing the subject of human reality Lesson Two: "Meaning is the polite word for pleasure"—or, how the beast in the nursery learns to read Lesson Three: "Language is by nature fictional"—or, why the word for moonlight can't be moonlight Lesson Four: "Desire must be taken literally"—a few words on death, sex, and interpretation Lesson Five: "You are not yourself"—or, I (think, therefore I) is an other Part 2. Extimacy: Five Lessons in the Utter Alterity of Absolute Proximity Lesson Six: "This restlessness is us"—or, the least that can be said about Hegel Lesson Seven: "There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism"—or, the fates of literary formalism Lesson Eight: "The unconscious is structured like a language"—or, invasions of the signifier Lesson Nine: "There is nothing outside the text"—or, fear of the proliferation of meaning Lesson Ten: "One is not born a woman"—on making the world queerer than ever Reference Matters Index

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Book SynopsisBreaking with linearity the ruling narrative model in the Jewish-Christian tradition since the ancient world many 20th-century European writers adopted circular narrative forms. Juan Luis Toribio Vazquez shows this trend was not a unified nor conscious movement, but rather a series of works arising sporadically in different countries at different times, using a variety of circular structures to express similar concerns and ideas about the world. This study also shows how the renewed understanding of narrative form leading to this circular trend was anticipated by Nietzsche's critiques of truth, knowledge, language and metaphysics, and especially by his related discussions of nihilism and the eternal recurrence. Starting with an analysis of the theory and genealogy of linear narrative, the author charts the emergence of Nietzsche's idea of eternal return, before then turning to the history of the circular narrative trend. This history is explored from its inception, in the works of Trade ReviewIn this groundbreaking work, Juan Luis Toribio Vazquez retraces the teleological view of literature through a wide expanse of texts, both narrative and of literary criticism – from Homer to Aristotle, Tasso and Schiller – before delineating how certain authors of modern literature rejected linearity in favour of circular forms of narrative. Built on Nietzschean philosophy, particularly on his idea of eternal recurrence, the book’s close engagement with writers and dramatists, ranging from Strindberg to Nabokov, Joyce, Borges and Calvino, radically reconfigures the aesthetics grounding these texts. This brilliant account adds an important dimension to the evolution of the Western narrative. * Thirthankar Chakraborty, Assistant Professor of English, Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai, India, and co-editor of Samuel Beckett as World Litertature *Far from a mere typology, Circular Narratives in Modern European Literature is both ambitious in scope and quite original in dealing with its central premise. Toribio Vazquez offers a personal attempt to present and understand the many different circular alternatives probed by the 20th-century writers under the spell of Nietzsche’s negative philosophy, a milestone for the contemporary collapse of linearity. His close readings compose an engaging picture of modernism(s) in Europe, sensitive to singularities and also particularly attentive of non-canonical names, such as Azorín and Kharns. A fine, comprehensive study, theory and analysis concerned. * Fábio de Souza Andrade, Professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, University of São Paulo, Brazil *In this wide-ranging comparative study Toribio Vazquez extends our understanding of post-Nietzschean poetics. His corpus of canonical and non-canonical 20th-century writers exploit structures of circularity for a variety of purposes, from the axiological and psychological to the existential and self-referential. This is an ambitious and impressive piece of work. * Duncan Large, Professor of European Literature and Translation, University of East Anglia, UK *Table of ContentsForeword by Shane Weller (University of Kent, UK) Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: The Genealogy of Linearity 2. Nietzsche’s Bequest: Buddha’s Shadow and the ‘Greatest Burden’ 3. The Birth of Circularity: Strindberg, Stein and Azorín 4. ‘Vivir es Volver’: Queneau, Nabokov and Kharms 5. Circulus Vitiosus Litterae: Joyce, Borges and the Theatre of the Absurd 6. Circular Echoes: Robbe-Grillet, Calvino, Cortázar and Blanchot 7. Conclusion: Circular Narratives in Modern European Literature References Index

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Book SynopsisManuel Portela is Professor in the Department of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, where he directs the PhD Programme in Materialities of Literature. He is the author of Scripting Reading Motions: The Codex and the Computer as Self-Reflexive Machines (MIT Press, 2013) and O Comércio da Literatura: Mercado e Representação [The Commerce of Literature; Marketplace and Representation] (Antígona, 2003). He is the general editor of LdoD Archive: Collaborative Digital Archive of the Book of Disquiet (https://ldod.uc.pt, 2017).Trade ReviewDear reader, if you are a believer in the almighty virtues of the representational power of editions, if you are a true disciplinarian in textual matters, if you hold that knowledge validation in the digital humanities depends exclusively on quantitative criteria, Literary Simulation and the Digital Humanities is not for you. Or is it? * João Dionísio, Associate Professor, School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, Portugal *Table of ContentsIncipit: Evolutionary Textual Environment 1. From Archive to Simulator 2. Reading as Simulation 3. Editing as Simulation 4. Writing as Simulation 5. Living on in the Web Explicit: No Problem Has a Solution Acknowledgments References Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. They are the things we step on without noticing and the largest organisms on Earth. They are symbols of inexplicable growth and excruciating misery. They are grouped with plants, but they behave more like animals. In their inscrutability, mushrooms are wondrous organisms. The mushroom is an ordinary object whose encounters with humans are usually limited to a couple of species prepackaged at the grocery store. This book offers mushrooms as much more than a pasta ingredient or trendy coffee alternative. It presents these objects as the firmament for life as we know it, enablers of mystical traditions, menders of minds lost to depression. But it acknowledges, too, that this firmament only exists because of death and rot. Rummaging through philosophical, literary, medical , ecological , and anthropological texts only serves to confirm what the average forager already knows: thaTrade ReviewIn times when fungi mean high tech and big business, this book gracefully brings the human-mushroom relationship back to earth. An ode to our partners in eco-intimacy and mortality, it reminds us that foraging involves much more than learning how to ID--it also requires risking, dreaming, and opening to the future. Mushroom belongs on every forager's shelf, next to the field guides. * Margret Grebowicz, author of Rescue Me: On Dogs and Their Humans *Table of ContentsPre-amble Summer Part I. Mystery Fall Part II. Metaphor Winter Part III. Mycology Spring Part IV. Medicine Summer Part V. Magic Fall Post-Amble Index

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Book SynopsisAmanda Parrish Morgan is a Writing Instructor at Fairfield University and a Westport Writers' Workshop Instructor. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Guernica, The Millions, The Rumpus, The American Scholar, Women's Running, JSTOR Daily, Ploughshares, and N+1, among other places.Trade ReviewFor Morgan, strollers aren't just tools we use, or products we buy; they're dense symbols, with no single or settled meaning, of our relationships to parenting. * New Yorker *Designed objects tell stories, and the stroller is no different - except perhaps that it's a typology that has received little sustained critical framing until this text. A compelling writer, Amanda Parrish Morgan deftly weaves together conversations around aspiration, accessibility, and aesthetics as they relate to this accouterment of modern parenthood and posits the stroller as a complex and sometimes confounding topic worthy of our attention and inquiry. This is an immensely readable volume, and we’re proud to have it on our bookshelves. * Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick, authors of Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births *Part object history, part capitalist critique, a consistently acute and deeply felt depiction of the pleasures, traps, thrills, and dangers of early parenthood, Amanda Parrish Morgan's Stroller compellingly depicts the history and taxonomy of this most weighty and unruly device, ally, and antagonist. * Lynn Steger Strong, author of Want *Table of Contents1. Child-Friendly and Child-Centric 2. Carry the Baby 3. The Pram in the Hall 4. Prams of Good and Evil 5. The Years of Magical Worrying 6. Get Your Body Back 7. Strolling 8. A Taxonomy of Stroller as Metaphor Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.X-rays are powerful. Moving through objects undetected, revealing the body as a tryptic of skin, tissue, and bone. X-rays gave rise to a transparent world and the belief that transparency conveys truth. It stands to reason, then, that our relationship with X-rays would be a complicated one of fear and fascination, acceptance and resistance, confusion and curiosity.In X-ray, Nicole Lobdell explores when, where, and how we use X-rays, what meanings we give them, what metaphors we make out of them, and why, despite our fears, we''re still fascinated with them. In doing so, she draws from a variety of fields, including the history of medicine, science and technology studies, literature, art, material culture, film, comics, gender studies, architecture, and industrial design.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlan

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Book SynopsisHonorable Mention, Harry Levin Prize, 2022 (American Comparative Literature Association)Beyond English: World Literature and India radically alters the debates on world literature that hinge on the model of circulation and global capital by deeply engaging with the idea of the world and world-making in South Asia. Tiwari argues that Indic words for world (vishva, jagat, sansar) offer a nuanced understanding of world literature that is antithetical to a commodified and standardized monolingual globe. She develops a comparative study of the concept of world literature (vishva sahitya) in Rabindranath Tagore's works, the desire for a new world in the lyrics of the Hindi shadowism (chhayavaad) poets, and world-making in Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai's Chemmeen (1956) and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997). By emphasizing the centrality of literature (sahitya) through a close reading of texts, Tiwari orients world literatureTrade ReviewTiwari has written a lively riposte to “world literature” mongering that is also a wide-ranging introduction to aspects of twentieth century Indian literature in various languages. Engaging the work of well-known writers like Rabindranath Tagore as well as of writers who should be better known, like the Hindi-language Chhayavaad poet Mahadevi Varma, Tiwari boldly changes the terrain over which the “world literature” debate is conducted by bringing to the fore critical terms through which the non-Anglophone writers that she examines themselves understood this debate. Through this decolonizing move she takes us not just beyond English but beyond “world literature” to what she intriguingly calls a “worldly comparative literature.” * S. Shankar, Chair and Professor, Department of English, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, USA, and author of Ghost in the Tamarind: A Novel *Beyond English is a highly original and insightful analysis of world literature from a perspective deeply embedded in a major world literature. Refusing the hegemony of English still evident in many studies of global literature and focusing on Indian texts that invoke and imagine the world in far-reaching and provocative ways, Tiwari truly vernacularizes the concept of world literature to offer a fresh take on postcolonial studies, literary studies, and South Asian letters. * Ulka Anjaria, Professor of English, Brandeis University, USA, and author of Reading India Now: Contemporary Formations in Literature and Popular Culture *Beyond English is an important contribution to the ongoing recalibration of relations among comparative, postcolonial, and world literary studies. Attending to the politics and poetics of translation within and across Indian languages, Bhavya Tiwari advances a worldly comparative literature that is open to the poetics of different worlds, as we savor ‘the sap’ of literary works both in the original and in translation. Exemplifying its own theme, Beyond English is itself a highly original translation across the conflictual worlds of literary studies today. * David Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, Director, Institute for World Literature, Harvard University, USA *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Note on Translation Introduction: Beyond English 1. Why World Literature? Vishva Sahitya Universalism, Sahitya, and Sahit Translation and Vishva Sahitya 2. Here Is World Literature The World-making of the English Gitanjali Tagore’s Translations, World-making, and Gitanjali in Prose-poems World-making of Gitanjali in Spanish 3. The World Is in the Lyrics The World in Lyrics The World-making of Chhayavaad World vs. Vishva Sahitya in Hindi 4. (Woman) Author and the World World-making vs. Vishva Varma’s Sahitya and Vishva 5. World in Translation, World in the Original Chemmeen’s Vishva in India and Beyond To Compare, To World World-making of Small Things India in the Original, India in Translation Coda: World Literature and India Endnotes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisApocalyptic Ruin and Everyday Wonder in Don DeLillo's America is a fresh and engaging study of last things in Don DeLillo's worksthings like death, mourning, and the decline of the American empire, but then also the apocalypse, the last judgment, and the end of the world more generally. Michael Naas untangles complex themes in short, witty chapters that highlight and celebrate DeLillo's inventive and playful writing, employing a novel approach to literary criticism. Making no use of secondary sources, the book is entirely a discussion of DeLillo''s work, accessible to any level of readership while maintaining a firm grasp of the theory necessary to make this unique argument.And yet, this book is also about all the things that double or shadow those last things in the very same works, like the wonder of language or the radiance of everyday events. From Americana (1971) up through Zero K (2016) and The Silence (2020), and perhaps like no other American author,Trade ReviewMichael Naas's Apocalyptic Ruin and Everyday Wonder in Don DeLillo's America displays a thorough knowledge and an impressive thematic cartography of Don DeLillo's oeurve. This invaluable synthesis, which consider's DeLillo's work through the lens of contrabanding, illuminates the contradictions that make America what it is and confirms DeLillo's magisterial and uninterrupted examination of America as a country and as an idea. * Karim Daanoune, Associate Professor in American Literature, Université Paul Valéry-Montpellier, France *In Apocalyptic Ruin and Everyday Wonder in Don DeLillo’s America, Michael Naas artfully delineates the dense web of thematic crosscurrents and connections that run through DeLillo’s entire oeuvre. Naas foregrounds the pleasure of reading DeLillo, allowing the humour of the works to be reflected in his own distinctive and accessible writing style. Naas reads DeLillo’s fiction as a body of theoretical enquiry in itself rather than applying existing theory and criticism, making this an innovative and necessary addition to scholarship. * Rebecca Harding, Independent Scholar, UK *Table of ContentsAbbreviations of Works by Don DeLillo Preface: Last Things 1. Countermovements America…New York, New York…“USA! USA! USA!”…The West, the Desert, and, Inevitably, California…Automobiles…Airplanes…Beyond America 2. Countercurrents Sports, Games, Sports Gaming…Academia…Philosophy…Technologies of Life and Death 3. Counterproductions Empire, Capital, the Corporation…Money…Advertising…Consumerism and Waste 4. Counterhistories American History 2.0…Terrorism…9-11, The Twin Towers…Creation and Ruin…War and Peace 5. Countermeasures Self and Others…The Individual and the Crowd…Prophylactics and Purifications...The Shit, the Shower, the Shave, and the Haircut 6. Counterforces Life and Death…Mourning…The Afterlife…The Apocalypse…The Omega Point, the Death Drive 7. Counterworlds Space…Time…Space-Time…Religion… Miracles…The Everyday…Earth, Moon, Sun…Radiance Conclusion: Silent Mode (The Future of Contraband) Acknowledgements

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Book SynopsisAuthors and the World traces how four core modes of authorship' have developed and inflect one another in modern Germany through a series of twenty different case studies, including the work of Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, Anna Seghers, Walter Höllerer, Felicitas Hoppe and Katja Petrowskaja, and original interview material with contemporary writers Ulrike Draesner, Olga Martynova and Ulrike Almut Sandig. Modes of authorship' are attitudes taken towards being an author that can be seen both in what an individual author does and in how a particular literary tradition or trend is perceived and mediated by others both within and beyond Pierre Bourdieu's literary field. Consequently, they deliberately straddle questions of literary production and reception. Rebecca Braun sets out how the commemorative, celebratory, utopian and satirical modes interact with one another to produce a number of models of authorship that carry either foundational or otherwise normative force for society. InTrade ReviewRebecca Braun's amazingly varied study of authorship shifts the view from the lives of writers to the practice of authorship – the crafted persona of a whole social environment. Along the way, Braun shakes up our understanding of the contemporary German literary scene. Moving quickly past the familiar male gatekeepers of Grass, Enzensberger and Walser, she brings us face-to-face with neglected literary mavericks from the East and new voices of women immigrants from Russia, Romania and Serbia. A very original study in which 'place' becomes a fleeting ideological Heimat. * Timothy Brennan, Professor of Comparative Literature and English, University of Minnesota, USA *Rebecca Braun’s Authors and the World represents an important foray into a new contemporary typology of authorship that will benefit scholars in literary studies and beyond. With a focus on German-speaking literature, this investigation of celebratory, commemorative, utopian and satirical modes of authorship provides the reader with pertinent insights into the post-war literary industry and its modes of self-representation and brings into focus female writers marginalized in recent canonization processes. * Birgit Lang, Professor of German, University of Melbourne, Australia *Highly original and immensely readable, Rebecca Braun’s impressive study provides us with a new model for understanding literary authorship and the contexts and factors that shape it in the twentieth century and beyond. The result is both a brilliant reading of cultural history and an important theoretical re-evaluation of known concepts of authorship. Through detailed interpretations of a stunning variety of cultural texts and archives (novels, journalistic writings, poetry, films and documentaries, social networks, places, and objects), Braun develops four distinct modes of performative authorship (celebratory, commemorative, utopian, satirical) and shows how they can overlap, coalesce, and inflect one another. She uses this innovative framework to read of some of the most important texts of the German-language canon in East and West Germany; she moves from the writing of the “literary giants” of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Thomas Mann to the contemporary, transnational texts of Olga Martynova and Katja Petrowskaja. Conversations with three female authors round out this remarkable book and illustrate in practice Braun’s central argument that authorship is a co-creative, iterative process. Authors and the World will be an indispensable reference in German Studies on contemporary literary authorship. I loved reading it! * Anke S. Biendarra, Associate Professor of European Languages and Studies, University of California, Irvine, USA *Table of ContentsList of Figures Acknowledgements Note on Translations Introduction: Rethinking Goethe’s World Literature through Questions of Authorship 1. Four Modes of Authorship across the German Twentieth Century 2. The Exemplary Creator: Modelling Authorship in Post-War West Germany 3. The Exemplary Pedagogue: Alternative Foundations for Belonging in the GDR 4. Mediating Authorship in Berlin and Frankfurt, 1959-1989 5. After the Death of the Author: The Rise of the Utopian Mode, 1988-2018 6. New Collaborations: Models of Transnational Authorship in Contemporary German-speaking Europe In Conversation: Ulrike Draesner: On Creating Contexts for Literature In Conversation: Olga Martynova on Living in Multiple Literary Worlds In Conversation: Ulrike Almut Sandig on Collaborating across Media, Genres, and Countries Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisEscape, Escapism, Escapology: American Novels of the Early Twenty-First Century identifies and explores what has emerged as perhaps the central theme of 21st-century American fiction: the desire to escapefrom the commodified present, from directionless history, from moral deathat a time of inescapable globalization. The driving question is how to find an alternative to the world within the world, at a time when utopian and messianic ideals have lost their power to compel belief. John Limon traces the American answer to that question in the writings of some of the most important authors of the last two decadesChabon, Diaz, Foer, Eggers, Donoghue, Groff, Ward, Saunders, and Whitehead, among othersand finds that it always involves the faux utopian freedom and pseudo-messianic salvation of childhood.When contemporary novelists feature actual historical escape, pervasively from slavery or Nazism, it appears in their novels as escape envy or escape nostalgiTrade ReviewIf you haven’t yet encountered John Limon’s work, you have some exhilarating surprises ahead: it’s witty, keenly idiosyncratic, beautifully adroit at drawing unexpected connections, and spectacularly attuned to the evocative possibilities of both paradox and pathos. Escape, Escapism, Escapology: American Novels of the Early Twenty-First Century is a savvy examination of crucial obsessions in some of our most ambitious and canonical contemporary fictions, helping us through the problem of conceiving not only what we’re escaping from but also what we’re escaping to. The result is an argument that will compel both the ornithologists and the birds: one that our Michael Chabons will find as illuminating as our Stanley Cavells. * Jim Shepard, author of The Book of Aron *Limon's bleakly funny and effortlessly learned study examines novels for which this, the world now before us, is ‘as good as it gets.’ That equivocal and confounding prospect, it turns out, haunts contemporary fiction in previously unimaginable ways. This is literary criticism at its very best. * Michael Szalay, Professor of English, Film, and Media, University of California, Irvine, USA *John Limon’s Escape, Escapism, Escapology will stand as a landmark study of the early twenty-first century Anglophone novel. Its elaboration of escapism offers a brilliantly original and suggestive framework for a widescale reconsideration of the force and interest of contemporary fiction. I can think of very few recent works of criticism that can match its interpretive verve and its contagious curiosity. It is thrilling to read such an intellectually forceful engagement with aesthetic culture of the present moment. * Deak Nabers, Associate Professor of English, Brown University, USA *Table of ContentsIntroduction Part I: Escape, Escapism, Escapology 1. Notes from Neverland 2. I Flit, I Float, I Fleetly Flee, I Fly [on The Sound of Music] Part II: Family Likenesses 3. The Escapist [on Michael Chabon] 4. Mellon [on Junot Diaz] 5. Bath and Bathos [on Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer] 6. The Beauty! The Horror! [on Emma Donoghue] 7. Et in Nobis Arcadia [on Lauren Groff] 8. The Ethics of Immortality [on Colson Whitehead] 9. The Songs of Murdered Souls [On Jesmyn Ward and George Saunders] Part III: Foreign Correspondents 10. Choice and the Chosen [on David Grossman] 11. Categorical Denial [on Arundhati Roy] Part IV: Prequel 12. The Tunnel Out [on William H. Gass] Acknowledgments References Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.A cylinder of baked graphite and clay in a wood case, the pencil creates as it is being destroyed. To love a pencil is to use it, to sharpen it, and to essentially destroy it. Pencils were used to sketch civilization's greatest works of art. Pencils were there marking the choices in the earliest democratic elections. Even when used haphazardly to mark out where a saw's blade should make a cut, a pencil is creating. Pencil offers a deep look at this common, almost ubiquitous, object. Pencils are a simple device that are deceptively difficult to manufacture. At a time when many use cellphones as banking branches and instructors reach students online throughout the world, pencil use has not waned, with tens of millions being made and used annually. Carol Beggy sketches out how the lowly pencil is still a mighty useful tool. Object Lessons is pTrade ReviewA fascinating voyage of discovery demonstrating why, in an age of electronic everything, the pencil still grips us. * Daniel Rosenberg, Professor of History, University of Oregon, USA, and author of Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline *This tribute to the lowly pencil is a celebration of the life of the mind and hand. Born in the sixteenth century, this familiar writing instrument lives on in our digital age as a tool of thought, indispensable for some, an object of nostalgia for others, collectible or disposable, a bond of community or a companion in solitude. Carol Beggy captures the presence of pencils in our lives with enthusiasm and wit. Her book is an object lesson in how to see and appreciate the humblest elements of existence and not to take anything for granted. * Robert A. Gross, author of The Transcendentalists and Their World (2021) *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Variations on a Theme 2. Making Their Mark 3. Tools of the Trade 4. People and Their Pencils 5. To Boldly Go 6. Collectors Versus Users 7. Pencils in the Wild 8. A Thoreau Job 9. Pencils Up 10. #FindYourPeople Afterword Notes Acknowledgments Selected Bibliography and Suggested Further Reading Index

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Book SynopsisRandy Malamud is Regents' Professor of English at Georgia State University, USA. He is the author of 12 books, including the influential Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity (1998), The Importance of Elsewhere: The Globalist Humanist Tourist (2018), and Strange Bright Blooms: A History of Cut Flowers (2021). He writes about film, travel, ecocriticism, and culture for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Times Higher Education, Film Quarterly, Senses of Cinema, Film International, Common Knowledge, Salon, Huffington Post, The Conversation, and truthout. He has been interviewed about his books on NPR, BBC, CNN, and numerous podcasts. He is a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics.

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Book SynopsisPROSE AWARDS MEDIA ADN CULTURAL STUDIES FINALIST 2024The Gutenberg Parenthesis traces the epoch of print from its fateful beginnings to our digital present and draws out lessons for the age to come.The age of print is a grand exception in history. For five centuries it fostered what some call print culture a worldview shaped by the completeness, permanence, and authority of the printed word. As a technology, print at its birth was as disruptive as the digital migration of today. Now, as the internet ushers us past print culture, journalist Jeff Jarvis offers important lessons from the era we leave behind.To understand our transition out of the Gutenberg Age, Jarvis first examines the transition into it. Tracking Western industrialized print to its origins, he explores its invention, spread, and evolution, as well as the bureaucracy and censorship that followed. He also reveals how print gave rise to the idea of the mass mass media, mass markeTrade ReviewAn accomplished and detailed survey of life between the brackets. * Wall Street Journal *A refreshingly sanguine take. -- Houman Barekat * The Guardian *Provocative and fizzing with ideas. -- Alan Rusbridger * Prospect *The Gutenberg Parenthesis follows the development of printing and its impact on society right up to the present day … Jarvis’s tempo is … fast and compelling, sweeping the reader along from Gutenberg to the present digital predicament facing society. -- Richard Ovenden * Financial Times *Jeff Jarvis is the ideal guide for this fast-paced history of communication. Shrewd, witty and always generous to his fellow authors, this book is crammed with pointed observation and profound reflection on the present and future of information culture. As print transitions to the digital age, Jarvis explores the potentialities and dangers of unbridled access to information as a realist who sees a path to sanity as our media turbulence finds a new normal. * Andrew Pettegree, Wardlaw Professor of History, University of St. Andrews, UK *Puts a sharp focus on how journalism will evolve in the digital age. * It's All Journalism *Jeff Jarvis magisterially charts how the invention of printing shifted power from individuals and communities to experts and the undifferentiated 'masses,' and then brilliantly shows how the internet is reversing this half-millenium shift. Information in print became a controlled commodity with enforced scarcity that reinforced language and institutional borders and power. Initially extending the reach of thought, printing shaped that thought; the medium became the message, on steroids. Digital now makes possible and even insists upon richer, less controlled exchange of ideas, including fakes. What we need, Jarvis makes clear, is not censorship of our chaotic global conversation but clear goals, guardrails, and institutions to ensure inclusion, accuracy, and privacy. We are all facing this together, and are now all on notice to take up Jarvis' challenge. * Anthony Marx, President and CEO, New York Public Library *Jeff Jarvis’ The Gutenberg Parenthesis invites disenchanted media users to scour the history of print for lessons that may help us build a better future for media. No one has thought as nimbly as Jarvis about how communications shape societies, and his polemic gives hope for these disenchanted times. * Leah Price, Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor of English, Rutgers University, USA *Table of ContentsPart I. THE GUTENBERG PARENTHESIS 1. The Parenthesis 2. Print’s Presumptions 3. Trepidation Part II. INSIDE THE PARENTHESIS 4. What Came Before 5. How to Print 6. Gutenberg 7. After the Bible 8. Print Spreads 9. The Troubles 10. Creation with Print 11. The Birth of the Newspaper 12. Print Evolves: Until 1800 13. Aesthetics of Print 14. Steam and the Mechanization of Print 15. Electricity and the Industrialization of Media 16. The Meaning of It All Part III. LEAVING THE PARENTHESIS 17. Conversation vs. Content 18. Death to the Mass 19. Creativity and Control 20. Institutional Revolutions Afterword: And What of the Book? Acknowledgements Notes Bibliography Index Colophon

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.As a former world-ranked swimmer whose journey toward naturalization and U.S. citizenship began with a swimming fellowship, Piotr Florczyk reflects on his own adventures in swimming pools while taking a closer look at artists, architects, writers, and others who have helped to cement the swimming pool's prominent and iconic role in our society and culture.Swimming Pool explores the pool as a place where humans seek to attain the unique union between mind and body.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewHaving spent most of my life around a pool, no one would fault me taking it for granted. But Swimming Pool tells a unique and compelling story of the swimming pool, allowing me to appreciate that it’s more than just a place to cool off or go back and forth along a black line. Florczyk has done a remarkable job bringing to the surface the potentially unanticipated way that pools have affected us, for the good and the bad. * Rada Owen, USA Olympic Swim Team, 2000 *A beautifully associative work, in which Florczyk makes visible the often-hidden role that swimming pools have long played in the global artistic, cultural, and literary landscape. Whether shaped like kidney beans and back lit or of Olympic dimensions with the perfect gutters and that ever-present black line—whether sighted jewel-like from the air as signs of suburban ‘white flight,’ or drained, abandoned, and re-appropriated by the skateboarders who also surf—swimming pools are emblems of everything from sanctuary, to privilege, to athleticism, to leisure. Florczyk’s language flows around this object, and I encourage all readers to plunge in. * Emily Hodgson Anderson, Professor of English and College Dean of Undergraduate Education, University of Southern California, USA *Table of Contents1. Where Do You Swim? 2. What Is Your Pool? 3. Why Do You Swim? 4. Who Gets to Swim? Afterword: From Pool to Page Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.For a century, magazines were the authors of culture and taste, of intelligence and policy until they were overthrown by the voices of the public themselves online. Here is a tribute to all that magazines were, from their origins in London and on Ben Franklin's press; through their boom enabled by new technologies as creators of a new media aesthetic and a new mass culture; into their opulent days in advertising-supported conglomerates; and finally to their fall at the hands of the internet. This tale is told through the experience of a magazine founder, the creator of Entertainment Weekly at Time Inc., who was also TV critic at TV Guide and People and finally an executive at Condé Nast trying to shepherd its magazines into the digital age.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewFew people have thought as hard or as well about magazines as Jeff Jarvis does. He describes Magazine as an elegy, and it's a beautiful one, but it's so much more—a love letter to the heyday of a glorious form, a roundhouse punch thrown at those who failed as its custodians, an elegant and insightful history of a medium, and a vivid, funny, unsparing memoir. It's a pleasure to read him, and a privilege to learn from him. * Mark Harris, journalist and author of Mike Nichols: A Life (2021) *A starter, lover, student, and doubter of magazines, Jeff Jarvis is here to explain to us—in beautiful and entertaining prose—what the magazine was when it was great, and how the internet undid it, by wiring us together in a different way, and giving everyone a printing press. The call that magazines once answered is still heard, he argues. It is to ‘set the idea of community free from geography.' * Jay Rosen, Associate Professor of Journalism, New York University, USA *Having devoted a chunk of my life to writing for and editing magazines, I wondered whether Jeff Jarvis’s smart little chronicle, Magazine, would feel like nostalgia or PTSD. He opened so well, it ceased to matter. * The Common Reader *Table of Contents1. The End 2. The Beginning of the End 3. The Beginning 4. Magazines' Golden Century 5. Inside the Gilded Factory 6. Tangled in the Web 7. Next Bibliography Notes Index

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Book SynopsisMargaret H. Freeman is Co-Director of the Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts, MA, USA. Professor Freeman's past publications include The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition (2020).Trade ReviewFreeman's book is not just an engagingly learned re-introduction to Emily Dickinson but a provocation to consider how contemporary scholarship on embodied cognition may serve as a means of building a more complete understanding of Dickinson's poetic art. * Ryan Cull, Associate Professor of English, New Mexico State University, USA *Drawing on the insights of cognitive science, Margaret Freeman demonstrates that understanding a poem, even before any attempt at interpretation, is to cognitively experience it, allowing it to reveal itself by what it is saying and doing. Her subtle and meticulous analyses illustrate how those “animate organisms” work, and they are thus true eye-openers as well as an enormous gain for all lovers of Dickinson’s poems, academics and general readers alike. * Gudrun Grabher, Professor Emerita of American Studies, University of Innsbruck, Austria *Margaret Freeman's new book challenges our preconceptions not only about Emily Dickinson but also about the rapidly growing field of cognitive literary studies. She works scrupulously with all levels of Dickinson's poems, descrying impalpable nuances of poetic language while never losing sight of the final analysis and sense of indefinable but alluring artistic work. Freeman's book applies cognitive science findings and heuristics to literary studies and proffers a holistic view of the ways we read a poem, accompanied by step-by-step comments and striking readings. * Denis Akhapkin, Associate Professor of Languages and Literature, Smolny College, Russia *Table of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments 1. Demure as Dynamite: Dickinson and Cognition 2. Everything Counts: Reading the Manuscripts 3. The Manuscript Markings 4. Measuring Time in Meter and Rhythm 5. Affective Prosody 6. The Life of Words 7. Bringing a Poem to Life 8. Intimate Discourse 9. Grounded-Self Spaces 10. The Presence of Self 11. The Way We Map 12. Intentional Mapping 13. Conceiving a Universe 14. A Transformative Poetics 15. Dickinsonian Cognition Appendix References Index of First Lines Subject Index

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Book SynopsisDrawing on a global history of politicized writing, this book explores literature's utility as a mode of activism and aesthetic engagement with the political challenges of the current moment.The question of literature's uses' has recently become a key topic of academic and public debate. Paradoxically, however, these conversations often tend to bypass the rich history of engagements with literature's distinctly political uses that form such a powerful current of 20th- and 21st-century artistic production and critical-theoretical reflection. The Political Uses of Literature reopens discussion of literature's political and activist genealogies along several interrelated lines: As a foundational moment, it draws attention to the important body of interwar politicized literature and to debates about literature's ability to intervene in social reality. It then traces the mobilization of related conversations and artistic practices across several historical conjunctures, most notably the committed literature of the 1960s and our own present. In mapping out these geographically and artistically diverse traditions including case studies from the Americas, Europe, Africa, India and Russia contributors advance critical discussions in the field, making questions pertaining to politicized art newly compelling to a broader and more diverse readership. Most importantly, this volume insists on the need to think about literature's political uses today at a time when it has become increasingly difficult to imagine any kind of political efficacy for art, even as the need to do so is growing more and more acute. Literature may not proffer easy answers to our political problems, but as this collection suggests, the writing of the 20th century holds out aesthetic resources for a renewed engagement with the dilemmas that face us now.

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Book SynopsisIn Untold Futures, J. K. Barret locates models for recovering the variety of futures imagined within some of our most foundational literature. These poems, plays, and prose fictions reveal how Renaissance writers embraced uncertain potential to think about their own present moment and their own place in time. The history of the future that Barret reconstructs looks beyond futures implicitly dismissed as impossible or aftertimes defined by inevitability and fixed perspective. Chapters on Philip Sidney's Old Arcadia, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline, and John Milton's Paradise Lost trace instead a persistent interest in an indeterminate, earthly future evident in literary constructions that foreground anticipation and expectation. Barret argues that the temporal perspectives embedded in these literary texts unsettle some of our most familiar points of Trade ReviewUntold Futures offers persuasive close analysis of the literary techniques and devices through which Barret suggests these writers were constantly 'capturing, pacing, arranging and reimagining linear time'.... [T]he future is destabilized, overdetermined, and ultimately, 'reliably, even permanently, ephemeral' in Untold Futures. This book succeeds in making us question not only the fixity of future times, but the very terms we use to describe this period in history itself. * Renaissance Quarterly *A smart and daring work of scholarship that speaks to some of the most pressing issues in the study of sixteenth and seventeenth-century literature today. Barret's argument ties together a novel critique of periodization with a sophisticated recuperation of the aesthetic, and her style of argumentation realizes an alternative critical model to the historicism that has long held sway over the field. Untold Futures should be read by anybody for whom the 'literary' in literary history still makes a difference, and should be required to be read by everybody for whom it does not. * Shakespeare Quarterly *Thought-provoking, insightful, and carefully crafted.... At the heart of Untold Futures, then, is a challenge to familiar teleologies. Calvinist election, secularist science, the humanist recovery of antiquity: all are in play as these authors pose alternative conceptions of future time, but none of these developments explains early modern temporal consciousness as these literary works envision it. Barret instead credits literature itself for constructing new modes of temporality. * Journal of British History *One of the many things that makes this book impressive is the fact that Barret is not just a skilled intellectual and literary historian, but also an expert close-reader. She manages to weave big ideas through the complex particularities of literary language without losing any of the latter's nuance or energy. * Studies in English Literature *Barret's way of thinking and challenging the habitual perceptions of time are groundbreaking. * The Sixteenth Century Journal *The book is a shot in the arm for critics wondering about the direction literary scholarship will take in the years and decades to come. Fortunately, Barret makes a strong case that the future is wide open. * Comitatus *A thought-provoking, insightful, and carefully crafted book. * Journal of British Studies *Barret does a fine job articulating technical and historically sited arguments in accessible language, and she avoids contemporary theoretical jargon in favor of broad engagement with a refreshingly diverse range of scholarly approaches. * Choice *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Promising the Future: The Language of Obligation in Sidney's Old Arcadia 2. The History of the Future: Spenser's The Faerie Queene and the Directions of Time 3. The Fiction of the Future: Dangerous Reading in Titus Andronicus 4. Shakespeare's Second Future: Anticipatory Nostalgia in Cymbeline 5. Imminent Futures: Absent Art and Improvised Rhyme in Antony and Cleopatra and Cymbeline Afterword: Circles of the Future: Memory or Monument in Paradise Lost

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Book SynopsisSeductive Reasoning takes a provocative look at contemporary Anglo-American literary theory, calling into question the critical consensus on pluralism''s nature and its status in literary studies. Drawing on the insights of Marxist and feminist critical theory and on the works of Althusser, Derrida, and Foucault, Rooney reads the pluralist's invitation to join in a dialogue as a seductive gesture. Critics who respond find that they must seek to persuade all of their potential readers. Rooney examines pluralism as a form of logic in the work of E. D. Hirsch, as a form of ethics for Wayne Booth, as a rhetoric of persuasion in the books of Stanley Fish. For Paul de Man, Rooney argues, pluralism was a rhetoric of tropes just as it was, for Fredric Jameson, a form of politics.Trade Review"Difference excludes. On this irreducible principle of irreducibility much literary theory is founded. With its internal drive to system and purity, theory enacts the necessity of exclusion; and so an appeal to theory often prefigures a justification of exclusion. The only contemporary movement whose relation to theory might seem ambivalent is pluralism, which, insofar as it insists on anything, insists on repressing its own exclusions. Ellen Rooney argues in her new book that pluralism maintains its identity by rigorous exclusion-'the exclusion of exclusion' itself."-Modern PhilologyTable of Contents1. Reading Pluralism Symptomatically2. Persuasion and the Production of Knowledge3. The Limits of Pluralism Are Not Plural4. "Not to Worry": The Therapeutic Rhetoric of Stanley Fish5. Not Taking Sides: Reading the Rhetoric of Persuasion6. This Politics Which Is Not One

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Book SynopsisExploring the intricacy and complexity of Walter Pater's prose, Transfigured World challenges traditional approaches to Pater and shows precise ways in which the form of his prose expresses its content. Carolyn Williams asserts that Pater's aestheticism and his historicism should be understood as dialectically interrelated critical strategies, inextricable from each other in practice. Williams discusses the explicit and embedded narratives that play a crucial role in Pater's aesthetic criticism and examines the figures that compose these narratives, including rhetorical tropes, structures of argument such as genealogy, and historical or fictional personae.Trade ReviewIn addition to her superb analysis of the style and thought of Pater's individual writing, demonstrates that Pater was far more philosophically coherent and complex, and of far more interest for contemporary critical thought, than has previously been recognized. Her book is the best critical study on Pater yet written. * Victorian Studies *A convincing account of the unity of Pater's thought and probably the most detailed treatment ever attempted of the intricacies of his prose; a book that is likely to be an essential source for future readings of Pater. * Nineteenth-Century Literature *Table of ContentsPart One: Opening Conclusions1. "That Which Is Without"2. "The Inward World of Thought and Feeling"3. Aestheticism4. Answerable Style5. Historicism6. Aesthetic Historicism and "Aesthetic Poverty"7. The Poetics of RevivalPart Two: Figural Strategies in The Renaissance1. Legend and Historicity2. Myths of History: The Last Supper3. The Historicity of Myth4. Myths of History: The Mona Lisa5. Types and Figures6. Low and High Relief: "Luca Della Robbia"7. The Senses of ReliefPart Three: Historical Novelty and Marius the Epicurean1. The Transparent Hero2. Autobiography of the Zeitgeist3. The Transcendental Induction4. Typology as Narrative Form5. Typological Ladders6. Christian Historicism7. Literary History as "Appreciation"Part Four: "Recovery as Reminiscence": The Greek Studies and Plato and Platonism1. Histories of Myth: The Greek Studies2. The House Beautiful and Its Interpreter3. The Philosophy of Mythic Form4. The History of Philosophy5. The Anecdote of the Shell6. Dialogue and Dialectic7. Paterian Recollection: The Anagogic Mind

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Book SynopsisIn The Arts of Cinema, Martin Seel explores film's connections to the other arts and the qualities that distinguish it from them. In nine concise and elegantly written chapters, he explores the cinema's singular aesthetic potential and uses specific examples from a diverse range of filmsfrom Antonioni and Hitchcock to The Searchers and The Bourne Supremacyto demonstrate the many ways this potential can be realized. Seel's analysis provides both a new perspective on film as a comprehensive aesthetic experience and a nuanced understanding of what the medium does to us once we are in the cinema.Trade ReviewIn his tremendously stimulating aesthetics of cinema, Martin Seel writes that films absorb the presence of the spectator more than all other works of art.... One of the merits of his book is that it is informed by a wide spectrum of film history, from the Marx Brothers to Fassbinder. * Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung *In his stimulating volume, the philosopher Seel looks for the essence and especially the particularity of the cinema, tracing the roots of cinema in other arts. According to Seel, film takes up elements from all of these arts and realizes its unique potential. Films like Hitchcock's North by Northwest or Antonioni's Zabriskie Point explode the boundaries of space and draw all of the spectator’s senses into it. * Deutschlandfunk [German Public Radio] *An exciting work of ‘philosophy meets cinema’—intellectually sophisticated but written in a rich, playful style—this book is both impressive and delightful. * academicworld.net *Seel grounds his philosophical work in close textual analysis of a small selection of representative films, including Hollywood classics, such as The Searchers; art films, such as Caché; and more recent action films, such as The Bourne Supremacy. As a work of philosophy and film theory, the book is notable for its lively engagement with complex ideas and for its inviting prose. It will appeal primarily to those with a strong interest in film aesthetics. * Choice *Anyone who studies, watches, or appreciates films for their beauty and artistic value will enjoy Seel's musings in philosophy and art. * Communication Booknotes Quarterly (CBQ) *Table of ContentsOpening Credits: Affairs—The Site of the Cinema—"Film"—The Course of Things—The Film Program 1. Film as Architecture: A Beginning—Division of Space—Ambient Sound—Some Opening Credits—Landscapes—Two Extremes—An Ending—Spatial Imagination—More Opening Credits 2. Film as Music: A Prelude—Time Connections—Action (1)—Double Motion—Action (2)—Spaces of Time—Higher Rhythm—Explosion 3. Film as Image: People Waiting—Pictorial Appearing—Image and Movement—Photography and Film—Another Trip— The Promise of Photography—Image Analysis—The Promise of Film—Another Ending 4. Film as Spectacle: Anarchy—Division of Space, Again—Virtuality—Sculpturality— Actors—Voices—Theatricality—Attractionism—Ecstasy 5. Film as Narrative: Three Films—Abstinence—Narrative Disposition—Telling Stories—Perspectivity—Filmic Storytelling—Cinema's Temporal Form—The Present Past 6. Film as Exploration: In Baghdad—Urban Landscapes—Realities—Processes of Documentation—A Double Promise—Techniques of Fiction— Questions of Style—Loss of Control—References to the World—The End 7. Film as Imagination: At Bakersfield—An Illusionistic Interpretation—The Figure of the Illusionist—Illusion and Immersion—Imagination Not Illusion—Photography and Film, Again—Twofold Attention—Illusion as a Technique—Caché 8. Film as Emotion: The End, Yet Again—The Illusionist's Final Appearance— Motion and Emotion—Corporeality—Sensate Understanding— Expressivity—Engagement—Twofold Attention, Again—Mixed Emotions—Godard 9. Film as Philosophy: Flashbacks—Another Affair—Three Dimensions—Cine- anthropology—Active Passivity—An Encore—Landscapes, Once Again Closing Credits: Notice—Thanks

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Book SynopsisIn The Arts of Cinema, Martin Seel explores film's connections to the other arts and the qualities that distinguish it from them. In nine concise and elegantly written chapters, he explores the cinema's singular aesthetic potential and uses specific examples from a diverse range of filmsfrom Antonioni and Hitchcock to The Searchers and The Bourne Supremacyto demonstrate the many ways this potential can be realized. Seel's analysis provides both a new perspective on film as a comprehensive aesthetic experience and a nuanced understanding of what the medium does to us once we are in the cinema.Trade ReviewIn his tremendously stimulating aesthetics of cinema, Martin Seel writes that films absorb the presence of the spectator more than all other works of art.... One of the merits of his book is that it is informed by a wide spectrum of film history, from the Marx Brothers to Fassbinder. * Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung *In his stimulating volume, the philosopher Seel looks for the essence and especially the particularity of the cinema, tracing the roots of cinema in other arts. According to Seel, film takes up elements from all of these arts and realizes its unique potential. Films like Hitchcock's North by Northwest or Antonioni's Zabriskie Point explode the boundaries of space and draw all of the spectator’s senses into it. * Deutschlandfunk [German Public Radio] *An exciting work of ‘philosophy meets cinema’—intellectually sophisticated but written in a rich, playful style—this book is both impressive and delightful. * academicworld.net *Seel grounds his philosophical work in close textual analysis of a small selection of representative films, including Hollywood classics, such as The Searchers; art films, such as Caché; and more recent action films, such as The Bourne Supremacy. As a work of philosophy and film theory, the book is notable for its lively engagement with complex ideas and for its inviting prose. It will appeal primarily to those with a strong interest in film aesthetics. * Choice *Anyone who studies, watches, or appreciates films for their beauty and artistic value will enjoy Seel's musings in philosophy and art. * Communication Booknotes Quarterly (CBQ) *Table of ContentsOpening Credits: Affairs—The Site of the Cinema—"Film"—The Course of Things—The Film Program 1. Film as Architecture: A Beginning—Division of Space—Ambient Sound—Some Opening Credits—Landscapes—Two Extremes—An Ending—Spatial Imagination—More Opening Credits 2. Film as Music: A Prelude—Time Connections—Action (1)—Double Motion—Action (2)—Spaces of Time—Higher Rhythm—Explosion 3. Film as Image: People Waiting—Pictorial Appearing—Image and Movement—Photography and Film—Another Trip— The Promise of Photography—Image Analysis—The Promise of Film—Another Ending 4. Film as Spectacle: Anarchy—Division of Space, Again—Virtuality—Sculpturality— Actors—Voices—Theatricality—Attractionism—Ecstasy 5. Film as Narrative: Three Films—Abstinence—Narrative Disposition—Telling Stories—Perspectivity—Filmic Storytelling—Cinema's Temporal Form—The Present Past 6. Film as Exploration: In Baghdad—Urban Landscapes—Realities—Processes of Documentation—A Double Promise—Techniques of Fiction— Questions of Style—Loss of Control—References to the World—The End 7. Film as Imagination: At Bakersfield—An Illusionistic Interpretation—The Figure of the Illusionist—Illusion and Immersion—Imagination Not Illusion—Photography and Film, Again—Twofold Attention—Illusion as a Technique—Caché 8. Film as Emotion: The End, Yet Again—The Illusionist's Final Appearance— Motion and Emotion—Corporeality—Sensate Understanding— Expressivity—Engagement—Twofold Attention, Again—Mixed Emotions—Godard 9. Film as Philosophy: Flashbacks—Another Affair—Three Dimensions—Cine- anthropology—Active Passivity—An Encore—Landscapes, Once Again Closing Credits: Notice—Thanks

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Book SynopsisSome contemporary approaches to literature still accept the separation of historical, biographical, external concerns from formal, internal ones. On the borderline that lends this division between inside and outside its apparent coherence is signature. In Peggy Kamuf's view, studying signature will help us to rediscover some of the stakes of literary writing beyond the historicist/formalist opposition. Drawing on Derrida's extensive work on signatures and proper names, Kamuf investigates authorial signature in key writers from Rousseau to Woolf, as well as the implications of signature for the institutions of authorship and criticism.Trade ReviewThe strange embrace of dominance and opposition, of denial and return is what we witness in contemporary criticism; but Kamuf’s demanding and rewarding book teaches that that ‘scene’ is part of what has been a longer playing drama. -- Ross Chambers * French Forum *The strength of Signature Pieces does not lie in its illumination of any particular corpus of texts, historical period, author, or genre, but in its rigorous use of deconstructive logic to walk the tightrope between the opposed reductions of historicism and formalism. -- William Ray * Comparative Literature *

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Book SynopsisTobin Siebers asserts that literary criticism is essentially a form of ethics. The Ethics of Criticism investigates the moral character of contemporary literary theory, assessing a wide range of theoretical approaches in terms of both the ethical presuppositions underlying the critical claims and the attitudes fostered by the approaches. Building on analyses of the moral legacies of Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, and Freud, Siebers identifies the various fronts on which the concerns of critical theory impinge on those of ethics.Trade ReviewThe Ethics of Criticism should contribute to the new theoretical conversation through its conclusions about specific thinkers and by moving others to think harder and say more about the relation among ethics, criticism, and literature. -- James Phelan * Modern Philology *

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Book SynopsisIn The One, Other, and Only Dickens, Garrett Stewart casts new light on those delirious wrinkles of wording that are one of the chief pleasures of Dickens's novels but that go regularly unnoticed in Dickensian criticism: the linguistic infrastructure of his textured prose. Stewart, in effect, looks over the reader's shoulder in shared fascination with the local surprises of Dickensian phrasing and the restless undertext of his storytelling. For Stewart, this phrasal undercurrent attests both to Dickens's early immersion in Shakespearean sonority and, at the same time, to the effect of Victorian stenography, with the repressed phonetics of its elided vowels, on the young author's verbal habits long after his stint as a shorthand Parliamentary reporter.To demonstrate the interplay and tension between narrative and literary style, Stewart draws out two personas within Dickens: the Inimitable Boz, master of plot, social panorama, and set-piece rhetorical cadences, and a veTrade ReviewThe One, Other, and Only Dickens is sui generis... Stewart offers an exuberant appreciation of Dickens's language, a celebration of craft.... Stewart points toward a return to the pleasurable, slow reading of both criticism and primary texts, but Stewart champions sustained and passionate attentiveness as integral to that process. Stewart's lovely reading, and writing, will be a pleasure to readers who agree with Thackeray's 1847 appraisal of Dickens that 'There's no writing against such power as this-one has no chance!' * SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 *A series of compelling readings from the inklings of nebulous popular consensus. * Dickens Quarterly *Passage after passage of this kind not only leave you feeling as if you have consistently under-read Dickens, but also, retracing Stewart's granular detail, that Dickens is the unequaled master of English prose, the only peer in prose to Shakespeare in verse. * Victorian Studies *Table of ContentsForeword: Preparing the Way Introduction: Some "Reagions" for Reading 1. Shorthand Speech / Longhand Sound 2. Secret Prose / Sequestered Poetics 3. Phrasing Astraddle 4. Reading Lessens Afterword: "That Very Word, Reading" Endpiece: The One and T'Otherest Notes Index

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Book SynopsisIn The One, Other, and Only Dickens, Garrett Stewart casts new light on those delirious wrinkles of wording that are one of the chief pleasures of Dickens's novels but that go regularly unnoticed in Dickensian criticism: the linguistic infrastructure of his textured prose. Stewart, in effect, looks over the reader's shoulder in shared fascination with the local surprises of Dickensian phrasing and the restless undertext of his storytelling. For Stewart, this phrasal undercurrent attests both to Dickens's early immersion in Shakespearean sonority and, at the same time, to the effect of Victorian stenography, with the repressed phonetics of its elided vowels, on the young author's verbal habits long after his stint as a shorthand Parliamentary reporter.To demonstrate the interplay and tension between narrative and literary style, Stewart draws out two personas within Dickens: the Inimitable Boz, master of plot, social panorama, and set-piece rhetorical cadences, and a veTrade ReviewThe One, Other, and Only Dickens is sui generis... Stewart offers an exuberant appreciation of Dickens's language, a celebration of craft.... Stewart points toward a return to the pleasurable, slow reading of both criticism and primary texts, but Stewart champions sustained and passionate attentiveness as integral to that process. Stewart's lovely reading, and writing, will be a pleasure to readers who agree with Thackeray's 1847 appraisal of Dickens that 'There's no writing against such power as this-one has no chance!' * SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 *A series of compelling readings from the inklings of nebulous popular consensus. * Dickens Quarterly *Passage after passage of this kind not only leave you feeling as if you have consistently under-read Dickens, but also, retracing Stewart's granular detail, that Dickens is the unequaled master of English prose, the only peer in prose to Shakespeare in verse. * Victorian Studies *Table of ContentsForeword: Preparing the Way Introduction: Some "Reagions" for Reading 1. Shorthand Speech / Longhand Sound 2. Secret Prose / Sequestered Poetics 3. Phrasing Astraddle 4. Reading Lessens Afterword: "That Very Word, Reading" Endpiece: The One and T'Otherest Notes Index

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Book SynopsisFirst-person poetry is a familiar genre in Latin literature. Propertius, Catullus, and Horace deployed the first-person speaker in a variety of ways that either bolster or undermine the link between this figure and the poet himself. In I, the Poet, Kathleen McCarthy offers a new approach to understanding the ubiquitous use of a first-person voice in Augustan-age poetry, taking on several of the central debates in the field of Latin literary studiesincluding the inheritance of the Greek tradition, the shift from oral performance to written collections, and the status of the poetic I-voice.In light of her own experience as a twenty-first century reader, for whom Latin poetry is meaningful across a great gulf of linguistic, cultural, and historical distances, McCarthy positions these poets as the self-conscious readers of and heirs to a long tradition of Greek poetry, which prompted them to explore radical forms of communication through the poetic form. Informed in part bTrade ReviewI, the Poet is an excellent, thought-provoking, and significant contribution to the study of Latin poetry. * Choice *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Voices on the Page 1. Poetry as Conversation 2. Poetry as Performance 3. Poetry That Says "Ego" 4. Poetry as Writing Epilogue: Ovid in Exile

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Book SynopsisThis book assess the relationship of literature to various other cultural forms in the Middle Ages. Jesse M. Gellrich uses the insights of such thinkers as Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Barthes, and Derrida to explore the continuity of medieval ideas about speaking, writing, and texts.Trade ReviewOne of the most successful attempts yet to apply contemporary literary theory to medieval poetry. -- A.J. Minnis * Times Literary Supplement *

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Book SynopsisThis groundbreaking book challenges the disciplinary boundaries that have traditionally separated scientific inquiry from literary inquiry. It explores scientific knowledge in three subject areasthe natural history of aging, literary narrative, and psychoanalysis. In the authors'' view, the different perspectives on cognition afforded by Anglo-American cognitive science, Greimassian semiotics, and Lacanian psychoanalysis help us to redefine our very notion of culture.Part I historically situates the concepts of meaning and truth in twentieth-century semiotic theory and cognitive science. Part II contrasts the modes of Freudian case history to the general instance of Einstein''s relativity theory and then sets forth a rhetoric of narrative based on the discourse of the aged. Part III examines in the context of literary studies an interdisciplinary concept of cultural cognition.Culture and Cognition will be essential reading for literary theorists, historians and

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewOne of the delights of this monograph is its omnivorous intermediality. Those interested in the interweaving of literary, artistic, and cultural disciplines through modernism will find this study interesting not only for its scope, but for the questions it throws up about a future of modernist studies which attends equally to the different strains of criticism that have shaped the field. * The Modernist Review *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Reformulating Modernism 1. Plastic Form: Henry James's Sculptural Aesthetics and Reading in the Round 2. Mortal Form: Still Life and Virginia Woolf 's Other Elegiac Shapes 3. Protean Form: Erotic Abstraction and Ardent Futurity in the Poetry of Mina Loy 4. Bad Formalism: Evelyn Waugh's Film Fictions and the Work of Art in the Age of Cinemechanics 5. Surface Forms: Photography and Gertrude Stein's Contact History of Modernism Epilogue: The Consolations of Form

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Book SynopsisIn The Ways of the Word, Garrett Stewart steps aside from theory to focus on the sheer pleasure of attentive reading and the excitement of recognizing the play of syllables and words upon which the best literary writing is founded. Emerging out of teaching creative writing and a broader effort to convene writers and critics, Stewart''s episodes in verbal attention track the means to meaning through the byways of literary wording.Through close engagement with literary passages and poetic instances whose imaginative demands are their own reward, Stewart gathers exhibits from dozens of authors: from Dickinson, Dickens, and DeLillo to Whitman, Woolf, and Colson Whitehead. In the process, idiom, tense, etymology, and other elements of expressive language and its phonetic wordplay are estranged and heard anew. The Ways of the Word fluidly and intuitively reveals a verbal alchemy that is as riveting as it is elusive and mysterious.Trade ReviewStewart is clearly having fun in this book, channeling techniques into his exposition with such parings as word's way and world's way, touchstone and touchtone, density and intensity, and epiphony and epiphany, to note just a few. Impressively erudite, this work will interest critics, creative writers, and literary-minded linguists. * Choice *

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Book SynopsisCan anyone say anything that has not already been said about the most scrutinized text in human history? In one of the most radical rereadings of the opening chapters of Genesis since The Zohar, David Kishik manages to do just that. The Book of Shem, a philosophical meditation on the beginning of the Bible and the end of the world, offers an inspiring interpretation of this navel of world literature. The six parts of the primeval story—God's creation, the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, Noah's Ark, the first covenant, and the Tower of Babel—come together to address a single concern: How does one become the human being that one is? By closely analyzing the founding text of the Abrahamic religions, this short treatise rethinks some of their deepest convictions. With a mixture of reverence and violence, Kishik's creative commentary demonstrates the post-secular implications of a pre-Abrahamic position. A translation of the Hebrew source, included as an appendix, helps to peel away the endless layers of presuppositions about its meaning. Trade Review"With The Book of Shem, we are far from the antiquarianism or spiritual edification one normally expects from a commentary on an ancient text. David Kishik's unconventional reading follows an unconventional method, one that clearly draws on vast erudition and real linguistic expertise."—Adam Kotsko, North Central College"The Book of Shem is a fantastic book that teaches us something new and returns us to something we have abandoned for too long. David Kishik turns his well-honed attention to a truly original question: how to translate 'origin'—how to relate it, relate to it, and let ourselves be interpellated by it."—Gil Anidjar, Columbia University"The Book of Shem is a rare work of scholarship that combines elegance with rigor, economy with originality. This is a book I want to teach, reread, and give as a gift."—Brian Britt, Virginia Tech

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Book SynopsisCan anyone say anything that has not already been said about the most scrutinized text in human history? In one of the most radical rereadings of the opening chapters of Genesis since The Zohar, David Kishik manages to do just that. The Book of Shem, a philosophical meditation on the beginning of the Bible and the end of the world, offers an inspiring interpretation of this navel of world literature. The six parts of the primeval story—God's creation, the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, Noah's Ark, the first covenant, and the Tower of Babel—come together to address a single concern: How does one become the human being that one is? By closely analyzing the founding text of the Abrahamic religions, this short treatise rethinks some of their deepest convictions. With a mixture of reverence and violence, Kishik's creative commentary demonstrates the post-secular implications of a pre-Abrahamic position. A translation of the Hebrew source, included as an appendix, helps to peel away the endless layers of presuppositions about its meaning. Trade Review"With The Book of Shem, we are far from the antiquarianism or spiritual edification one normally expects from a commentary on an ancient text. David Kishik's unconventional reading follows an unconventional method, one that clearly draws on vast erudition and real linguistic expertise."—Adam Kotsko, North Central College"The Book of Shem is a fantastic book that teaches us something new and returns us to something we have abandoned for too long. David Kishik turns his well-honed attention to a truly original question: how to translate 'origin'—how to relate it, relate to it, and let ourselves be interpellated by it."—Gil Anidjar, Columbia University"The Book of Shem is a rare work of scholarship that combines elegance with rigor, economy with originality. This is a book I want to teach, reread, and give as a gift."—Brian Britt, Virginia Tech

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Book SynopsisA case study of one of the most important global institutions of cultural policy formation, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary demonstrates the relationship between such policymaking and transformations in the economy. Focusing on UNESCO's use of books, Sarah Brouillette identifies three phases in the agency's history and explores the literary and cultural programming of each. In the immediate postwar period, healthy economies made possible the funding of an infrastructure in support of a liberal cosmopolitanism and the spread of capitalist democracy. In the decolonizing 1960s and '70s, illiteracy and lack of access to literature were lamented as a "book hunger" in the developing world, and reading was touted as a universal humanizing value to argue for a more balanced communications industry and copyright regime. Most recently, literature has become instrumental in city and nation branding that drive tourism and the heritage industry. Today, the agency largely treats high literature as a commercially self-sustaining product for wealthy aging publics, and fundamental policy reform to address the uneven relations that characterize global intellectual property creation is off the table. UNESCO's literary programming is in this way highly suggestive. A trajectory that might appear to be one of triumphant success—literary tourism and festival programming can be quite lucrative for some people—is also, under a different light, a story of decline.Trade Review"Brouillette brings to our attention a signal institution of postwar global culture, one that has been all but entirely ignored in previous studies of world literature. In her impressive and bracingly severe account, UNESCO becomes an institutional lens through which we can see the much larger and more powerful set of economic realities that have shaped our sense of what role literature should play in the world at large."—Mark McGurl, Stanford University"This book adds another dimension to Brouillette's already impressive scholarship on postcolonial literature and the global economic downturn. With bracingly rigorous yet refreshingly traditional methodology, she provides a bravura demonstration of nuanced, non-reductive Marxist analysis."—Stephen Schryer, University of New Brunswick"In her probe of UNESCO's transformations, Sarah Brouillette skewers the complacency of the reading class. Readers of this book, all of whom will be members of this class, will be enlightened, troubled, and perhaps mortified by their participation in the consolations of the literary world, including its most critical and politically aware corners. Brouillette's analysis is both necessary and devastating."—Wendy Griswold, Northwestern University"Sarah Brouillette's excellent new book, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary, grounds the category of 'world literature' in the only literary institution capable of matching the concept's scale....[Her] book is a powerful argument for the modest power of literature, however long it lasts."—Christopher Findeisen, Los Angeles Review of BooksTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. UNESCO's Collection of Representative Works 2. America's Postwar Hegemony 3. Cultural Policy and the Perils of Development 4. Book Hunger 5. Policy Making for the Creative Industries Today 6. Pirates and Pipe Dreams Conclusion

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Book SynopsisA case study of one of the most important global institutions of cultural policy formation, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary demonstrates the relationship between such policymaking and transformations in the economy. Focusing on UNESCO's use of books, Sarah Brouillette identifies three phases in the agency's history and explores the literary and cultural programming of each. In the immediate postwar period, healthy economies made possible the funding of an infrastructure in support of a liberal cosmopolitanism and the spread of capitalist democracy. In the decolonizing 1960s and '70s, illiteracy and lack of access to literature were lamented as a "book hunger" in the developing world, and reading was touted as a universal humanizing value to argue for a more balanced communications industry and copyright regime. Most recently, literature has become instrumental in city and nation branding that drive tourism and the heritage industry. Today, the agency largely treats high literature as a commercially self-sustaining product for wealthy aging publics, and fundamental policy reform to address the uneven relations that characterize global intellectual property creation is off the table. UNESCO's literary programming is in this way highly suggestive. A trajectory that might appear to be one of triumphant success—literary tourism and festival programming can be quite lucrative for some people—is also, under a different light, a story of decline.Trade Review"Brouillette brings to our attention a signal institution of postwar global culture, one that has been all but entirely ignored in previous studies of world literature. In her impressive and bracingly severe account, UNESCO becomes an institutional lens through which we can see the much larger and more powerful set of economic realities that have shaped our sense of what role literature should play in the world at large."—Mark McGurl, Stanford University"This book adds another dimension to Brouillette's already impressive scholarship on postcolonial literature and the global economic downturn. With bracingly rigorous yet refreshingly traditional methodology, she provides a bravura demonstration of nuanced, non-reductive Marxist analysis."—Stephen Schryer, University of New Brunswick"In her probe of UNESCO's transformations, Sarah Brouillette skewers the complacency of the reading class. Readers of this book, all of whom will be members of this class, will be enlightened, troubled, and perhaps mortified by their participation in the consolations of the literary world, including its most critical and politically aware corners. Brouillette's analysis is both necessary and devastating."—Wendy Griswold, Northwestern University"Sarah Brouillette's excellent new book, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary, grounds the category of 'world literature' in the only literary institution capable of matching the concept's scale....[Her] book is a powerful argument for the modest power of literature, however long it lasts."—Christopher Findeisen, Los Angeles Review of BooksTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. UNESCO's Collection of Representative Works 2. America's Postwar Hegemony 3. Cultural Policy and the Perils of Development 4. Book Hunger 5. Policy Making for the Creative Industries Today 6. Pirates and Pipe Dreams Conclusion

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Book SynopsisNotework begins with a striking insight: the writer's notebook is a genre in itself. Simon Reader pursues this argument in original readings of unpublished writing by prominent Victorians, offering an expansive approach to literary formalism for the twenty-first century. Neither drafts nor diaries, the notes of Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Vernon Lee, and George Gissing record ephemeral and nonlinear experiences, revealing each author's desire to leave their fragments scattered and unused. Presenting notes in terms of genre allows Reader to suggest inventive new accounts of key Victorian texts, including The Picture of Dorian Gray, On the Origin of Species, and Hopkins's devotional lyrics, and to reinterpret these works as meditations on the ethics of compiling and using data. In this way, Notework recasts information collection as a personal and expressive activity that comes into focus against large-scale systems of knowledge organization. Finding resonance between today's digital culture and its nineteenth-century precursors, Reader honors our most disposable, improvised, and fleeting written gestures. Trade Review"Encountering writers' notebooks on their own terms, Simon Reader carves out fresh and rewarding territory in the landscape of Victorian studies. Notework offers brilliant, wide-ranging commentary on little-studied archival materials in dialogue with, but not subordinated to, well-known works of the period."—Andrew Stauffer, University of Virginia"Written in an energetic, witty, and clear style, Notework is full of interest and fresh insight—an unexpected and provocative view on material that has wider implications for how we read."—Kathryn Sutherland, University of Oxford"Contrasting with the disjointed fragments he quotes, Reader's own fluent and energetic style guides us through discussions of formalism generally, and Formalism in particular, into the direct engagement that he promises."—Jacqueline Banerjee, Times Literary Supplement"Notework offers a major contribution to the genre theory and the history of reading because it makes valuable, really for the first time, an absolutely ubiquitous practice... Reader's approach can return us to the archive and attune us beyond the canon because it so profoundly values formal multiplicity."—Elisha Cohn, Modern Philology"Critics often view authorial notes as adjunct to the study of major works, and this purpose is still central. However, Reader contends, in addition to providing insight into the creative process, notes serve as a distinct body of literary work... Incidentally, his observations about the disconnected nature of communication in social media (think Twitter) lead one to wonder how these instances of "note work" might figure as a genre to future readers."—L. A. Brewer, CHOICE"As a study in how to interpret those primary sources that make up much of nineteenth-century literary history, Notework is an engaging reimagining of the Victorian information landscape and an important reconsideration of how literary studies treats ephemera in the nineteenth century and beyond.... Notework promises to be a cornerstone in the aesthetics of information and in the ongoing reassessment of the parts of the long nineteenth century that carry into our present."—Sierra Eckert, Modern Language Quarterly"Simon Reader's 'notework,' a new and happily-coined literary term, avoids the book in 'notebook' while evoking the dream in 'dreamwork' and the art in 'artwork.' In other words, the term itself does a lot of work for this excellent study of important noteworks in Victorian literature. By conceptualizing and naming it, Reader's term will generate further work on this novel genre."—Carolyn Williams, Prose Studies

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Book SynopsisIn Of Effacement, David Marriott endeavors to demolish established opinion about what blackness is and reorient our understanding of what it is not in art, philosophy, autobiography, literary theory, political theory, and psychoanalysis. With the critical rigor and polemical bravura which he displayed in Whither Fanon? Marriott here considers the relationships between language, judgement and effacement, and shows how effacement has become the dominant force in anti-blackness. Both skeptically and emphatically, Marriott presents a series of radical philosophical engagements with Fanon's "is not" (n'est pas) and its "black" political truth. How does one speak—let alone represent—that which is without existence? Is blackness n'est pas because it has yet to be thought as blackness? And if so, when Fanon writes of blackness, that it is n'est pas (is not), where should one look to make sense of this n'est pas? Marriott anchors these questions by addressing the most fundamental perennial questions concerning the nature of freedom, resistance, mastery, life, and liberation, via a series of analyses of such key figures as Huey Newton, Nietzsche, Malcolm X, Edward Said, Georges Bataille, Stuart Hall, and Lacan. He thus develops the basis for a reading of blackness by recasting its effacement as an identity, while insisting on it as a fundamental question for philosophy. Trade Review"Dazzlingly original, forcefully subtle in its argumentation, Of Effacement is undeniably path-breaking. Marriott's reading allows us to see Fanon's 'black being' as a 'disquieting in-plenitude' visible only in the way it curves the spaces of the personal, cultural, and political."—Joan Copjec, Brown University"Brilliant, relentless, and unblinking in its acknowledgment that 'there is no ontology of black pain,' David Marriott's Of Effacement is a tour de force of critical analysis. Lingering with Fanon's crystallization of wretchedness into 'a new law of expression' that would precipitate a 'politics beyond that of racial community,' Marriott refuses to avert his gaze from the abyss of Fanon's 'n'est pas.' For in the 'nothing that governs the world gone black,' he locates the possibility of invention without 'arche,telos, or predestined end.' The result is this rigorous, transformative, and supremely necessary book that dares, like Fanon, to 'make the incomprehensible the vocation of [its] politics' and so to open—in ways at once unbearable and exhilarating to contemplate—new pathways for our own."—Lee Edelman, Tufts University"With an unflinching lucidity in reading and critique, Marriott develops a demanding and often startling thinking across the fields of ontology, politics, and aesthetics. Of Effacement deserves the closest attention of all those working in philosophy and theory today."—Geoffrey Bennington, Emory UniversityTable of ContentsPreface PART I ONTOLOGY AND LANGUAGE One N'est Pas Two Nigra Philologica Three Nègre, Figura Four Ontology and Lalangue PART II WRITING AND POLITICS Five Autobiography as Effacement Six Crystallization Seven On Revolutionary Suicide Eight The Real and the Apparent PART III ART AND PHILOSOPHY Nine Corpus Exanime Notes Index

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Book SynopsisAn accessible introduction to cultural theory and an original polemic about the purpose of criticism. What is criticism for? Over the past few decades, impassioned disagreements over that question in the academy have burst into the news media. These conflicts have renewed the culture wars over the legacy of the 1960s, becoming entangled in national politics and leading to a new set of questions about critics and the power they do or don't wield. Re-examining theorists from Matthew Arnold to Walter Benjamin, to Fredric Jameson, Stuart Hall, and Hortense Spillers, Criticism and Politics explores the animating contradictions that have long propelled literary studies: between pronouncing judgment and engaging in philosophical critique, between democracy and expertise, between political commitment and aesthetic autonomy. Both a leftist critic and a critic of the left, Robbins unflinchingly defends criticism from those who might wish to de-politicize it, arguing that working for change is not optional for critics, but rather a core part of their job description. Trade Review"Urgent, bracing, and powerfully argued, Criticism and Politics will be controversial in the best sense—inviting us all to debate the purposes and presumptions of criticism on newly articulated grounds."—Caroline Levine, Cornell University, author of Forms"This is a vivid, engaging, and engaged piece of literary criticism, as well as a vigorous defense of criticism as a method, by one of its foremost practitioners."—Martin Puchner, Harvard University, author of Literature for a Changing Planet"For those who have been looking for a book to address, head on, the complex connections between literary criticism and politics, this is that book."—Mark Greif, Stanford University, author of Against Everything"This challenging, bold book helps answer the question of what critics are for. Highly recommended"—S. J. Shaw, CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Criticism in the Wake of the 1960s 2. Criticizing 3. Lost Centrality 4. Aesthetics and the Governing of Others 5. Grievances 6. The Historical and the Transhistorical 7. Cosmopolitical Criticism in Deep Time Conclusion

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