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Spring & Fall 1999 Books:
LITERATURE, LITERARY CRITICISM/ LANGUAGE:
American, English, French, Spanish, Other
_____________________________________________________________________
ANDRÉ GIDE
A Life in the Present
ALAN SHERIDAN
One of the most important writers of the twentieth century,
André Gide also led what was probably one of the most
interesting lives our century has seen. Gide knew and
corresponded with many of the major literary figures of his day,
from Mallarmé to Oscar Wilde. Though a Communist, his critical
account of Soviet Russia in Return from the USSR earned
him the enmity of the Left. A lifelong advocate of moral and
political freedom and justice, he was a proscribed writer on the
Vatican's infamous "Index." Self-published most of his
life, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947, at the age
of 77. An avowed homosexual, he nonetheless married his cousin,
and though their marriage was unconsummated, at 53 he fathered a
daughter for a friend.
Alan Sheridan's book is a literary biography of Gide, an intimate
portrait of the reluctantly public man, whose work was deeply and
inextricably entangled with his life. Gide's life provides a
unique perspective on our century, an idea of what it was like
for one person to live through unprecedented technological
change, economic growth and collapse, the rise of socialism and
fascism, two world wars, a new concern for the colonial peoples
and for women, and the astonishing hold of Rome and Moscow over
intellectuals. Following Gide from his first forays among the
Symbolists through his sexual and political awakenings to his
worldwide fame as a writer, sage, and commentator on his age,
Sheridan richly conveys the drama of a remarkable life; the
depth, breadth, and vitality of an incomparable oeuvre; and the
spirit of a time that both so aptly expressed.
March 1999 6 x 9 1/4 inches 35 halftones 752 pages
ISBN 0-674-03527-5 $35.00 cloth
A CRITIQUE OF POSTCOLONIAL REASON
Toward a History of the Vanishing Present
GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK
Are the "culture wars" over? When did they begin? What
is their relationship to gender struggle and the dynamics of
class? In her first full treatment of postcolonial studies, a
field that she helped define, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of
the world's foremost literary theorists, poses these questions
from within the postcolonial enclave.
"We cannot merely continue to act out the part of
Caliban," Spivak writes; and her book is an attempt to
understand and describe a more responsible role for the
postcolonial critic. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason
tracks the figure of the "native informant" through
various cultural practices--philosophy, history, literature--to
suggest that it emerges as the metropolitan hybrid. The book
addresses feminists, philosophers, critics, and interventionist
intellectuals, as they unite and divide. It ranges from Kant's
analytic of the sublime to child labor in Bangladesh. Throughout,
the notion of a Third World interloper as the pure victim of a
colonialist oppressor emerges as sharply suspect: the mud we
sling at certain seemingly overbearing ancestors such as Marx and
Kant may be the very ground we stand on.
A major critical work, Spivak's book redefines and repositions
the postcolonial critic, leading her through transnational
cultural studies into considerations of globality.
May 1999 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 1 line illus. 448 pages
ISBN 0-674-17763-0 $49.95 / £30.95 cloth
ISBN 0-674-17764-9 $24.95 / £15.50 paper
DEAD ELVIS
A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession
GREIL MARCUS
In life, Elvis Presley went from childhood poverty to stardom,
from world fame to dissipation and early death. As Greil Marcus
shows in this remarkable book, Presley's journey after death
takes him even further, pushing him beyond his own frontiers to
merge with the American public consciousness--and the American
subconscious. As he listens in on the public conversation that
recreates Elvis after death, Marcus tracks the path of Presley's
resurrection. He grafts together scattered fragments of the
eclectic dialogue--snatches of movies and music, books and
newspapers, photographs, posters, cartoons--and amazes us with
not only what America has been saying as it raises its late king,
but also what this strange obsession with a dead Elvis can tell
us about America itself.
March 1999 7 x 9 1/4 inches 54 halftones, 5 line illus. 288 pages
ISBN 0-674-19422-5 $17.95 / £10.95 paper
THE FOOTNOTE
A Curious History
ANTHONY GRAFTON
The weapon of pedants, the scourge of undergraduates, the bête
noire of the "new" liberated scholar: the lowly
footnote, long the refuge of the minor and the marginal, emerges
in this book as a singular resource, with a surprising history
that says volumes about the evolution of modern scholarship. In
Anthony Grafton's engrossing account, footnotes to history give
way to footnotes as history, recounting in their subtle
way the curious story of the progress of knowledge in written
form.
Grafton treats the development of the footnote--the one form of
proof normally supplied by historians in support of their
assertions--as writers on science have long treated the
development of laboratory equipment, statistical arguments, and
reports on experiments: as a complex story, rich in human
interest, that sheds light on the status of history as art, as
science, and as an institution. The book starts in the Berlin of
the brilliant nineteenth-century historian Leopold von Ranke, who
is often credited with inventing documented history in its modern
form. Casting back to antiquity and forward to the twentieth
century, Grafton's investigation exposes Ranke's position as a
far more ambiguous one and offers us a rich vision of the true
origins and gradual triumph of the footnote.
Among the protagonists of this story are Athanasius Kircher, who
built numerous documents into his spectacularly speculative
treatises on ancient Egypt and China; Pierre Bayle, who made the
footnote a powerful tool in philosophical and historical
polemics; and Edward Gibbon, who transformed it into a high form
of literary artistry. Proceeding with the spirit of an
intellectual mystery and peppered with intriguing and revealing
remarks by those who "made" this history, The
Footnote brings what is so often relegated to afterthought
and marginalia to its rightful place in the center of the
literary life of the mind.
April 1999 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches 255 pages
ISBN 0-674-30760-7 $14.00 paper
GREEK IAMBIC POETRY
From the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries BC
EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY DOUGLAS E.
GERBER
The poetry of the archaic period that the Greeks called iambic is
characterized by scornful criticism of friend and foe and by
sexual license. The purpose of these poems is unclear, but they
seem to have some connection with cult songs used in religious
festivals--for example, those honoring Dionysus and Demeter. In
this completely new Loeb Classical Library edition of early Greek
iambic poetry, Douglas Gerber provides a faithful and fully
annotated translation of the fragments that have come down to us.
Archilochus expressed himself in colorful and vigorous language.
Famous throughout antiquity for his winged barbs, he is often
considered the archetypal poet of blame. Other major poets in
this volume are Semonides, best known for a long misogynistic
poem describing ten types of wives; and Hipponax, who was much
admired by the poets of Hellenistic Alexandria, in part for his
depictions of the licentious and seamy side of society.
June 1999 4 1/8 x 6 1/4 inches 427 pages
ISBN 0-674-99581-3 $19.95x / £12.95 cloth
HOMER
Iliad
TRANSLATED BY A. T. MURRAY
Revised by William F. Wyatt
Here is a new Loeb Classical Library edition of Homer's stirring
heroic account of the Trojan war and its passions. The eloquent
and dramatic epic poem captures the terrible anger of Achilles,
"the best of the Achaeans," over a grave insult to his
personal honor and relates its tragic result--a chain of
consequences that proves devastating for the Greek forces
besieging Troy, for noble Trojans, and for Achilles himself. The
poet gives us compelling characterizations of his protagonists as
well as a remarkable study of the heroic code in antiquity.
The works attributed to Homer include the two oldest and greatest
European epic poems, the Odyssey and the Iliad.
These have been published in the Loeb Classical Library for three
quarters of a century, the Greek text facing a faithful and
literate prose translation by A. T. Murray. William F. Wyatt now
brings the Loeb's Iliad up to date, with a rendering that
retains Murray's admirable style but is written for today's
readers.
Volume 1: June 1999 4 1/8 x 6 1/4 336 pages ISBN
0-674-99579-1 $19.95x / £12.95 cloth
Volume 2: June 1999 4 1/8 x 6 1/4 416 pages ISBN 0-674-99580-5
$19.95x / £12.95 cloth
IN THE FASCIST BATHROOM
Punk in Pop Music, 1977-1992
GREIL MARCUS
Was punk just another moment in music history, a flash in time
when a group of young rebels exploded in a fury of raw sound,
outrageous styles, and in-your-face attitude? Greil Marcus,
author of the renowned Lipstick Traces, delves into the
after-life of punk as a much richer phenomenon--a form of
artistic and social rebellion that continually erupts into
popular culture. In more than seventy short pieces written over
fifteen years, he traces the uncompromising strands of punk from
Johnny Rotten to Elvis Costello, Sonic Youth, even Bruce
Springsteen. Marcus's unparalleled insight into present-day
culture and brilliant ear for music bring punk's searing
half-life into deep focus. Originally published in the U.S. as Ranters
and Crowd Pleasers.
March 1999 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches 9 line illus. 448 pages
ISBN 0-674-44577-5 $15.95 / £9.95 paper
MIKHAIL KUZMIN
A Life in Art
JOHN E. MALMSTAD AND NIKOLAY
BOGOMOLOV
Mikhail Kuzmin (1872-1936), Russia's first openly gay writer,
stood at the epicenter of the turbulent cultural and social life
of Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad for over three decades. A poet
of the caliber of Aleksandr Blok, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris
Pasternak, Osip Mandelshtam, and Marina Tsvetaeva (and
acknowledged as such by them and other contemporaries), Kuzmin
was also a prose writer, playwright, critic, translator, and
composer who was associated with every aspect of modernism's
history in Russia, from Symbolism to the Leningrad avant-gardes
of the 1920s.
Only now is Kuzmin beginning to emerge from the "official
obscurity" imposed by the Soviet regime to assume his place
as one of Russia's greatest poets and one of this century's most
characteristic and colorful creative figures. This biography, the
first in any language to be based on full and uncensored access
to the writer's private papers, including his notorious Diary,
places Kuzmin in the context of his society and times and
contributes to our discovery and appreciation of a fascinating
period and of Russia's long suppressed gay history.
April 1999 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches 11 halftones 512 pages
ISBN 0-674-53087-X $49.95x / £30.95 cloth
PROCEED WITH CAUTION, WHEN ENGAGED
BY MINORITY WRITING IN THE AMERICAS
DORIS SOMMER
Let the reader beware. Educated readers naturally feel entitled
to know what they're reading--often, if they try hard enough, to
know it with the conspiratorial intimacy of a potential partner.
This book reminds us that cultural differences may in fact make
us targets of a text, not its co-conspirators. Some literature,
especially culturally particular or "minority"
literature, actually uses its differences and distances to
redirect our desire for intimacy toward more cautious, respectful
engagements. To name these figures of cultural discontinuity--to
describe a rhetoric of particularism in the Americas--is the
purpose of Proceed with Caution.
In a series of daring forays, from seventeenth-century Inca
Garcilaso de la Vega to Julio Cortázar and Mario Vargas Llosa,
Doris Sommer shows how ethnically marked texts use enticing and
frustrating language games to keep readers engaged with
difference: Gloria Estefan's syncopated appeal to solidarity
plays on Whitman's undifferentiated ideal; unrequitable
seductions echo through Rigoberta Menchú's protestations of
secrecy, Toni Morrison's interrupted confession, the rebuffs in a
Mexican testimonial novel. In these and other examples, Sommer
trains us to notice the signs that affirm a respectful distance
as a condition of political fairness and aesthetic
effect--warnings that will be audible (and engaging for readings
that tolerate difference) once we listen for a rhetoric of
particularism.
August 1999 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches 416 pages
ISBN 0-674-53658-X $55.00x / £34.50 cloth
ISBN 0-674-53660-6 $24.95x / £15.50 paper
PROFESSIONAL CORRECTNESS
Literary Studies and Political Change
STANLEY FISH
The discipline of literary criticism is strictly defined, and the
most pressing issues of our time--racism, violence against women
and homosexuals, cultural imperialism, and the like--are located
outside its domain. In Professional Correctness, Stanley
Fish raises a provocative challenge to those who try to turn
literary studies into an instrument of political change, arguing
that when literary critics try to influence society at large by
addressing social and political issues, they cease to be literary
critics at all. Anyone interested in the debate over the place of
cultural studies in the field of literary criticism, or the more
general question of whether academics can become the "public
intellectuals" many aspire to be, needs to read Fish's
powerful and unconventional argument for restoring discipline to
the academy.
April 1999 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 160 pages ISBN 0-674-71220-X $14.95x /
£9.50 paper
RECONTEXTUALIZING TEXTS
Narrative Perfomance in Modern Japanese Fiction
ATSUKO SAKAKI
Offering the first systematic examination
of five modern Japanese fictional narratives, all of them
available in English translations, Atsuko Sakaki explores Natsume
Soseki's Kokoro and The Three-Cornered World; Ibuse
Masuji's Black Rain; Mori Ogai's Wild Geese; and
Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's Quicksand. Her close reading of each
text reveals a hitherto unexplored area of communication between
narrator and audience, as well as between "implied
author" and "implied reader." By using this
approach, the author situates each of these works not in its
historical, cultural, or economic contexts but in the situation
the text itself produces.
May 1999 6 x 9 inches 275 pages
ISBN 0-674-75094-2 $39.50x / £24.50 cloth
SHREDDING THE TAPESTRY OF MEANING
The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katue (1902-1978)
JOHN SOLT
Kitasono Katue was a leading avant-garde
literary figure, first in Japan and then throughout the world,
from the 1920s to the 1970s. In his long career, Kitasono was
instrumental in creating Japanese-language work influenced by
futurism, dadaism, and surrealism before World War II and in
contributing a Japanese voice to the international avant-garde
movement after the war. This critical biography of Kitasono
examines the life, poetry, and poetics of this controversial and
flamboyant figure, including his wartime support of the Japanese
state. Using Kitasono as a window on Japanese literature in the
twentieth century, John Solt analyzes the relationship of
Japanese writers to foreign literary movements and the influence
of Japanese writers on world literature.
June 1999 6 x 9 inches 39 illus. 425 pages
ISBN 0-674-80733-2 $49.50x / £30.95 cloth
SRNGARAPRAKASA BY BHOJA, VOLUME 1
EDITED BY V. RAGHAVAN
This edition is based on new manuscripts of
this important treatise on classical Sanskrit poetics. It was
composed by the famous eleventh-century King Bhoja of Malwa (W.
India), a patron of traditional learning.
The text has never received a complete critical edition. It is
important not only because of the theoretical treatment of the
erotic sentiment (srngara) in classical Sanskrit texts. It is
also a mine of quotations from extant and also from lost Sanskrit
and Prakrit poetical texts.
August 1999 7 x 10 inches 916 pages
ISBN 0-674-88340-6 $95.00x / £59.50 cloth
STILL THE NEW WORLD
American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction
PHILIP FISHER
In this bold reinterpretation of American culture, Philip Fisher
describes generational life as a series of renewed acts of
immigration into a new world. Along with the actual flood of
immigrants, technological change brings about an immigration of
objects and systems, ways of life and techniques for the
distribution of ideas.
A provocative new way of accounting for the spirit of literary
tradition, Still the New World makes a persuasive argument
against the reduction of literature to identity questions of
race, gender, and ethnicity. Ranging from roughly 1850 to 1940,
when, Fisher argues, the American cultural and economic system
was set in place, the book reconsiders key works in the American
canon--from Emerson, Whitman, and Melville, to Twain, James,
Howells, Dos Passos, and Nathanael West, with insights into such
artists as Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. With striking
clarity, Fisher shows how these artists created and recreated a
democratic poetics marked by a rivalry between abstraction,
regionalism, and varieties of realism--and in doing so, defined
American culture as an ongoing process of creative destruction.
May 1999 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches 5 halftones, 1 line illus.
288 pages
ISBN 0-674-83859-9 $29.95x / £18.50 cloth
THOREAU'S COUNTRY
Journey through a Transformed Landscape
DAVID R. FOSTER
In 1977 David Foster took to the woods of New England to build a
cabin with his own hands. Along with a few tools he brought a
copy of the journals of Henry David Thoreau. Foster was struck by
how different the forested landscape around him was from the one
Thoreau described more than a century earlier. The sights and
sounds that Thoreau experienced on his daily walks through
nineteenth-century Concord were those of rolling farmland, small
woodlands, and farmers endlessly working the land. As Foster
explored the New England landscape, he discovered ancient ruins
of cellar holes, stone walls, and abandoned cartways--all
remnants of this earlier land now largely covered by forest. How
had Thoreau's open countryside, shaped by ax and plough, divided
by fences and laneways, become a forested landscape?
Part ecological and historical puzzle, this book brings a
vanished countryside to life in all its dimensions, human and
natural, offering a rich record of human imprint upon the land.
Extensive excerpts from the journals show us, through the vividly
recorded details of daily life, a Thoreau intimately acquainted
with the ways in which he and his neighbors were changing and
remaking the New England landscape. Foster adds the perspective
of a modern forest ecologist and landscape historian, using the
journals to trace themes of historical and social change.
Thoreau's journals evoke not a wilderness retreat but the
emotions and natural history that come from an old and humanized
landscape. It is with a new understanding of the human role in
shaping that landscape, Foster argues, that we can best prepare
ourselves to appreciate and conserve it today.
From the journal:
"I have collected and split up now quite a pile of
driftwood--rails and riders and stems and stumps of
trees--perhaps half or three quarters of a tree ... Each stick I
deal with has a history, and I read it as I am handling it, and,
last of all, I remember my adventures in getting it, while it is
burning in the winter evening. That is the most interesting part
of its history. It has made part of a fence or a bridge,
perchance, or has been rooted out of a clearing and bears the
marks of fire on it ... Thus one half of the value of my wood is
enjoyed before it is housed, and the other half is equal to the
whole value of an equal quantity of the wood which I buy."
--October 20, 1855
April 1999 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches 19 line illus. 288 pages
ISBN 0-674-88645-3 $27.95 / £17.50 cloth
WALTER BENJAMIN
Selected Writings
Volume 2: 1927-1934
MICHAEL W. JENNINGS, GENERAL EDITOR
In the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, amid economic
collapse and mounting political catastrophe, Walter Benjamin
emerged as the most original practicing literary critic and
public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of Selected
Writings, covering the years 1927 to 1934, displays the full
spectrum of Benjamin's achievements at this pivotal stage in his
career.
Previously concerned chiefly with literary theory, Benjamin
during these years does pioneering work in new areas, from the
study of popular culture (a discipline he virtually created) to
theories of the media and the visual arts. His writings on the
theory of modernity--most of them new to readers of
English--develop ideas as important to an understanding of the
twentieth century as any contained in his widely anthologized
essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Technological
Reproducibility."
This volume brings together previously untranslated writings on
major figures such as Brecht, Valery, and Gide, and on subjects
ranging from film, radio, and the novel to memory, kitsch, and
the theory of language. We find the manifoldly inquisitive
Benjamin musing on the new modes of perception opened up by
techniques of photographic enlargement and cinematic montage, on
the life and work of Goethe at Weimar, on the fascination of old
toys and the mysteries of food, and on the allegorical
significance of Mickey Mouse. Also included are several of
Benjamin's most entertaining radio scripts for a popular
audience, as well as some rare and revealing glimpses into a
fragmentary autobiography, in the form of diary entries, travel
sketches, recollections, and personal meditations.
May 1999 6 3/8 x 9 1/4 inches 14 halftones, 2 line illus.
704 pages
ISBN 0-674-94586-7 $37.50 / £23.50 cloth
THE WORLD THROUGH A MONOCLE
The New Yorker at Midcentury
MARY F. COREY
Today The New Yorker is one of a number of
general-interest magazines published for a sophisticated
audience, but in the post-World War II era the magazine occupied
a truly significant niche of cultural authority. A self-selected
community of 250,000 readers, who wanted to know how to look and
sound cosmopolitan, found in its pages information about night
spots and polo teams. They became conversant with English movies,
Italian Communism, French wine, the bombing of the Bikini Atoll,
prêt-à-porter, and Caribbean vacations. A well-known critic
lamented that "certain groups have come to communicate
almost exclusively in references to the [magazine's] sacred
writings." The World through a Monocle is a study of
these "sacred writings."
Mary Corey mines the magazine's editorial voice, journalism,
fiction, advertisements, cartoons, and poetry to unearth the
preoccupations, values, and conflicts of its readers, editors,
and contributors. She delineates the effort to fuse liberal
ideals with aspirations to high social status, finds the
magazine's blind spots with regard to women and racial and ethnic
stereotyping, and explores its abiding concern with elite
consumption coupled with a contempt for mass production and
popular advertising. Balancing the consumption of goods with a
social conscience which prized goodness, the magazine managed to
provide readers with what seemed like a coherent and
comprehensive value system in an incoherent world.
Viewing the world through a monocle, those who created The New
Yorker and those who believed in it cultivated a uniquely
powerful cultural institution serving an influential segment of
the population. Corey's work illuminates this extraordinary
enterprise in our social history.
April 1999 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches 256 pages
ISBN 0-674-96193-5 $25.95 / £15.95 cloth
WRITING WAS EVERYTHING
ALFRED KAZIN
New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 1995
For more than sixty years Alfred Kazin has been one of the most
eloquent witnesses to the literary life of the mind in America. Writing
Was Everything is a summation of that life, a story of coming
of age as a writer and critic that is also a vibrant cultural
drama teeming with such characters as Hart Crane and Allen
Ginsberg, Simone Weil and Flannery O'Connor, Hannah Arendt and
Robert Lowell, Edmund Wilson and George Orwell.
A deft blend of autobiography, history, and criticism that moves
from New York in the 1930s to wartime England to the postwar
South, Writing Was Everything emerges as a reaffirmation
of literature in an age of deconstruction and critical dogma. In
his encounters with books, Kazin shows us how great writing
matters and how it involves us morally, socially, and personally
on the deepest level. Whether reflecting on modernism, southern
fiction, or black, Jewish, and New Yorker writing or reliving the
work of Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, and John Cheever, he gives a
penetrating, moving account of literature observed and lived. In
his life as a critic, Kazin personifies the lesson that living
and writing are necessarily intimate.
Writing Was Everything encapsulates the lively wit and
authority of this timeless critic's unmistakable voice. It stands
as clear testimony to Kazin's belief that "literature is not
theory but, at best, the value we can give to our experience,
which in our century has been and remains beyond the imagination
of mankind."
April 1999 5 x 7 1/2 inches 160 pages
ISBN 0-674-96238-9 $12.00 / £7.50 paper
THE ARCADES PROJECT
WALTER BENJAMIN
Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote,
"finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which
they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927
and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The
Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a
monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of
thirteen years--"the theater," as Benjamin called it,
"of all my struggles and all my ideas."
Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed
rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin
presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on,
hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six
categories with descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion,"
"Boredom," "Dream City,"
"Photography," "Catacombs,"
"Advertising," "Prostitution,"
"Baudelaire," and "Theory of Progress." His
central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of
things--a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the
modern age.
The Arcades Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and
to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century
history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true
history" that underlay the ideological mask. In the
bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and
historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and
displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally
meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s)
embedded in the spaces of things.
November 1999 6 1/2 x 10 inches 46 halftones 960 pages
ISBN 0-674-04326-X: $39.95 / £24.95 cloth
THE COMPLETE CORRESPONDENCE,
1928-1940
THEODOR ADORNO AND WALTER BENJAMIN
The correspondence between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno,
which appears here for the first time in its entirety in English
translation, must rank among the most significant to have come
down to us from that notable age of barbarism, the twentieth
century. Benjamin and Adorno formed a uniquely powerful pair.
Benjamin, riddle-like in his personality and given to tactical
evasion, and Adorno, full of his own importance, alternately
support and compete with each other throughout the
correspondence, until its imminent tragic end becomes apparent to
both writers. Each had met his match, and happily, in the other.
This book is the story of an elective affinity. Adorno was the
only person who managed to sustain an intimate intellectual
relationship with Benjamin for nearly twenty years. No one else,
not even Gershom Scholem, coaxed so much out of Benjamin.
The more than one hundred letters in this book will allow readers
to trace the developing character of Benjamin's and Adorno's
attitudes toward each other and toward their many friends. When
this book appeared in German, it caused a sensation because it
includes passages previously excised from other German editions
of the letters--passages in which the two friends celebrate their
own intimacy with frank remarks about other people. Ideas
presented elliptically in the theoretical writings are set forth
here with much greater clarity. Not least, the letters provide
material crucial for understanding the genesis of Benjamin's Arcades
Project
November 1999 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches384 pages
ISBN 0-674-15427-4 $39.95x / £24.95 cloth
FICTION IN THE AGE OF PHOTOGRAPHY
The Legacy of British Realism
NANCY ARMSTRONG
Victorians were fascinated with how accurately photography could
copy people, the places they inhabited, and the objects
surrounding them. Much more important, however, is the way in
which Victorian people, places, and things came to resemble
photographs. In this provocative study of British realism, Nancy
Armstrong explains how fiction entered into a relationship with
the new popular art of photography that transformed the world
into a picture. By the 1860s, to know virtually anyone or
anything was to understand how to place him, her, or it in that
world on the basis of characteristics that either had been or
could be captured in one of several photographic genres. So
willing was the readership to think of the real as photographs,
that authors from Charles Dickens to the Brontës, Lewis Carroll,
H. Rider Haggard, Oscar Wilde, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and
Virginia Woolf had to use the same visual conventions to
represent what was real, especially when they sought to debunk
those conventions. The Victorian novel's collaboration with
photography was indeed so successful, Armstrong contends, that
literary criticism assumes a text is gesturing toward the real
whenever it invokes a photograph.
January 2000 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches 52 halftones 352 pages
ISBN 0-674-29930-2 $29.95x / £18.50 cloth
STORYTELLING IN THE NEW HOLLYWOOD
Understanding Classical Narrative Technique
KRISTIN THOMPSON
In a book as entertaining as it is enlightening, Kristin Thompson
offers the first in-depth analysis of Hollywood's storytelling
techniques and how they are used to make complex, easily
comprehensible, entertaining films. She also takes on the myth
that modern Hollywood films are based on a narrative system
radically different from the one in use during the Golden Age of
the studio system.
Drawing on a wide range of films from the 1920s to the
1990s--from Keaton's Our Hospitality to Casablanca
to Terminator 2--Thompson explains such staples of
narrative as the goal-oriented protagonist, the double plot-line,
and dialogue hooks. She domonstrates that the "three-act
structure," a concept widely used by practitioners and media
commentators, fails to explain how Hollywood stories are put
together.
Thompson then demonstrates in detail how classical narrative
techniques work in ten box-office and critical successes made
since the New Hollywood began in the 1970s: Tootsie, Back to the
Future, The Silence of the Lambs, Groundhog Day, Desperately
Seeking Susan, Amadeus, The Hunt for Red October, Parenthood,
Alien, and Hannah and Her Sisters. In passing, she suggests
reasons for the apparent slump in quality in Hollywood films of
the 1990s. The results will be of interest to movie fans,
scholars, and film practitioners alike.
November 1999 7 x 9 inches 40 halftones432 pages
cloth: ISBN 0-674-83974-9 $49.95x / £30.95
paperback: ISBN 0-674-83975-7 $24.95x / £15.50
THE BIBLE AS IT WAS
JAMES L. KUGEL
This is a guide to the Hebrew Bible unlike any other.
Leading us chapter by chapter through its most important
stories--from the Creation and the Tree of Knowledge through the
Exodus from Egypt and the journey to the Promised Land--James
Kugel shows how a group of anonymous, ancient interpreters
radically transformed the Bible and made it into the book that
has come down to us today.
Was the snake in the Garden of Eden the devil, or the Garden
itself "paradise"? Did Abraham discover monotheism, and
was his son Isaac a willing martyr? Not until the ancient
interpreters set to work. Poring over every little detail in the
Bible's stories, prophecies, and laws, they let their own
theological and imaginative inclinations radically transform the
Bible's very nature. Their sometimes surprising interpretations
soon became the generally accepted meaning. These
interpretations, and not the mere words of the text, became
the Bible in the time of Jesus and Paul or the rabbis of the
Talmud.
Drawing on such sources as the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient Jewish
apocrypha, Hellenistic writings, long-lost retellings of Bible
stories, and prayers and sermons of the early church and
synagogue, Kugel reconstructs the theory and methods of
interpretation at the time when the Bible was becoming the
bedrock of Judaism and Christianity. Here, for the first time, we
can witness all the major transformations of the text and
recreate the development of the Bible "As It Was" at
the start of the Common era--the Bible as we know it.
November 1999 6 1/2 x 10 inches First cloth edition: Fall 1997 24
halftones 700 pages
ISBN 0-674-06941-2 $19.95 / £12.50 paper
THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON
Reading Edition
EDITED BY R. W. FRANKLIN
Recipient of the Emily Dickinson International Society's Award
for Outstanding Contribution
There is a word
Which bears a sword
Emily Dickinson, poet of the interior life, imagined
words/swords, hurling barbed syllables/piercing. Nothing about
her adult appearance or habitation revealed such a militant soul.
Only poems, written quietly in a room of her own, often
hand-stitched in small volumes, then hidden in a drawer, revealed
her true self. She did not live in time but in universals--an
acute, sensitive nature reaching out boldly from self-referral to
a wider, imagined world.
Dickinson died without fame; only a few poems were published in
her lifetime. Her legacy was later rescued from her desk--an
astonishing body of work, much of which has since appeared in
piecemeal editions, sometimes with words altered by editors or
publishers according to the fashion of the day.
Now Ralph Franklin, the foremost scholar of Dickinson's
manuscripts, has prepared an authoritative one-volume edition of
all extant poems by Emily Dickinson--1,789 poems in all, the
largest number ever assembled. This reading edition derives from
his three-volume work, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum
Edition (1998), which contains approximately 2,500 sources
for the poems. In this one-volume edition, Franklin offers a
single reading of each poem--usually the latest version of the
entire poem--rendered with Dickinson's spelling, punctuation, and
capitalization intact. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading
Edition is a milestone in American literary scholarship and
an indispensable addition to the personal library of poetry
lovers everywhere.
September 1999 6 x 9 1/4 inches704 pages
ISBN 0-674-67624-6 $29.95 / £18.50 cloth
READING THE MOUNTAINS OF HOME
JOHN ELDER
Small farms once occupied the heights that John Elder calls home,
but now only a few cellar holes and tumbled stone walls remain
among the dense stands of maple, beech, and hemlocks on these
Vermont hills. Reading the Mountains of Homeis a journey
into these verdant reaches where in the last century humans tried
their hand and where bear and moose now find shelter. As John
Elder is our guide, so Robert Frost is Elder's companion, his
great poem "Directive" seeing us through a landscape in
which nature and literature, loss and recovery, are inextricably
joined.
Over the course of a year, Elder takes us on his hikes through
the forested uplands between South Mountain and North Mountain,
reflecting on the forces of nature, from the descent of the
glaciers to the rush of the New Haven River, that shaped a
plateau for his village of Bristol; and on the human will that
denuded and farmed and abandoned the mountains so many years ago.
His forays wind through the flinty relics of nineteenth-century
homesteads and Abenaki settlements, leading to meditations on
both human failure and the possibility for deeper communion with
the land and others.
An exploration of the body and soul of a place, an interpretive
map of its natural and literary life, Reading the Mountains of
Home strikes a moving balance between the pressures of
civilization and the attraction of wilderness. It is a beautiful
work of nature writing in which human nature finds its place,
where the reader is invited to follow the last line of Frost's
"Directive," to "Drink and be whole again beyond
confusion."
October 1999 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches 12 line illustrations, 2
maps 272 pages
ISBN 0-674-74889-1 $14.00 / £8.50 paper
NIGHTMARE ON MAIN STREET
Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic
MARK EDMUNDSON
Once we've terrified ourselves reading Anne Rice or Stephen King,
watching Halloween or following the O. J. Simpson trial,
we can rely on the comfort of our inner child or Robert Bly's
bongos, an angel, or even a crystal. In a brilliant assessment of
American culture on the eve of the millennium, Mark Edmundson
asks why we're determined to be haunted, courting the Gothic at
every turn--and, at the same time, committed to escape through
any new scheme for ready-made transcendence.
Nightmare on Main Street depicts a culture suffused with
the Gothic, not just in novels and films but even in the
nonfictive realms of politics and academic theories, TV news and
talk shows, various therapies, and discourses on AIDS and the
environment. Gothic's first wave, in the 1790s, reflected the
truly terrifying events unfolding in revolutionary France. What,
Edmundson asks, does the ascendancy of the Gothic in the 1990s
tell us about our own day?
And what of another trend, seemingly unrelated--the widespread
belief that re-creating oneself is as easy as making a wish?
Looking at the world according to Forrest Gump, Edmundson shows
how this parallel culture actually works reciprocally with the
Gothic.
An unchecked fixation on the Gothic, Edmundson argues, would
result in a culture of sadomasochism. Against such a rancorous
and dispiriting possibility, he draws on the work of Nietzsche and Shelley, and on the recent creations of Toni Morrison and Tony
Kushner, to show how the Gothic and the
visionary can come together in persuasive and renovating ways.
November 1999 ISBN 0-674-87484-6 5 1/4 x 8 1/4 inches 208
pages
ISBN 0-674-62463-7 $14.00 / £8.50 paper
THE ART OF SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS
HELEN VENDLER
In detailed commentaries on Shakespeare's 154 sonnets,
Vendler reveals previously unperceived imaginative and stylistic
features of the poems, pointing out not only new levels of import
in particular lines, but also the ways in which the four parts of
each sonnet work together to enact emotion and create dynamic
effect. The commentaries--presented alongside the original and
modernized texts--offer fresh perspectives on the individual
poems, and, taken together, provide a full picture of
Shakespeare's techniques as a working poet. With the help of
Vendler's acute eye, we gain an appreciation of
"Shakespeare's elated variety of invention, his ironic
capacity, his astonishing refinement of technique, and, above
all, the reach of his skeptical imaginative intent."
November 1999 6 1/2 x 10 inches 154 facsimilies, 35 illustrations
692 pages
ISBN 0-674-63712-7 $18.95/ £11.95 paper
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF OLEH LYSHEHA
OLEH LYSHEHA
Translated by the Author and James Brasfield
Oleh Lysheha is considered the "poets'
poet" of contemporary Ukraine. A dissident and iconoclast,
he was forbidden to publish in the Soviet Union from 1972 to
1988. Since then, his reputation has steadily grown to legendary
proportions. His work is informed by transcendentalism and
Zen-like introspection, with meditations on the essence of the
human experience and man's place in nature. James Brasfield
studied poetry and translation with Joseph Brodsky, Derek
Walcott, Daniel Halpern, and other luminaries. He served as an
editorial assistant for poetry at The Paris Review, and
now teaches English at Pennsylvania State University. The
Collected Poems here include facing-page English and
Ukrainian versions of selected poems and a play, "Friend Li
Po. Brother Tu Fu." It represents a rare example of
translations that are as beautiful as the original poetry and
poems that anyone interested in the written word will appreciate.
October 1999 6 x 9 inches 2 illustrations 120 pages
ISBN 0-916458-90-3 $12.95x / £7.95 paper
NEITHER BLACK NOR WHITE YET BOTH
Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature
WERNER SOLLORS
Why can a "white" woman give birth to a
"black" baby, while a "black" woman can never
give birth to a "white" baby in the United States? What
makes racial "passing" so different from social
mobility? Why are interracial and incestuous relations often
confused or conflated in literature, making
"miscegenation" appear as if it were incest? Werner
Sollors examines these questions and others in Neither Black
nor White yet Both, a fully researched investigation of
literary works that, in the past, have been read more for a
black-white contrast of "either-or" than for an
interracial realm of "neither, nor, both, and
in-between." From the origins of the term "race"
to the cultural sources of the "Tragic Mulatto," and
from the calculus of color to the retellings of various plots,
Sollors examines what we know about race, analyzing recurrent
motifs in scientific and legal works as well as in fiction,
drama, and poetry.
October 1999 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches 47 halftones 350 pages
ISBN 0-674-60780-5 $19.95x / £12.50 paper
THE STORY OF O
Prostitutes and Other Good-for-Nothings in the Renaissance
MICHELE SHARON JAFFE
This work unfolds the idea of
"nothing" out of a Titian painting of Dana and
the shower of gold. Jaffee's philological and pictorial argument
links, across several languages, such seemingly disparate
concepts as money, coins, mothers (through the mint's matrix),
subjects, courtiers, prostitutes (through etymologies that join
minting, standing-under, standing-for), ciphers, codes, and the
codex form. This ambitious book is a cultural history of the
"cipher" zero as code and as nothing, as the absence of
value and the place-holder constructing value. It traces the
wide-ranging implications of "nothing"--not only in
mathematics but also in literature. Along the way, it makes
important points about the orthography and editing of early
modern texts, and about the material affinities of these texts
with painting and minting.
September 1999 6 1/2 x 9 1/4 inches 21 halftones, 7 line
illustrations
cloth: ISBN 0-674-83950-1 $40.00x / £24.95
paperback: ISBN 0-674-83951-X $20.00x / £12.50
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