University of Chicago Press: New Titles in Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory

Childhood, Autobiography and the Francophone Caribbean

Louise Hardwick — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Childhood, Autobiography and the Francophone Caribbean sets out to examine the recent major turn in francophone Caribbean literature towards the récit d’enfance—or autobiography of childhood. It connects literary works to recent changes in public and education policy concerning the commemoration of slavery and colonialism both in France and at a global level. Examining key works by major contemporary writers such as Patrick Chamoiseau, Maryse Condé, and Dany Laferrière, it combines approaches from postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis, trauma theory, and gender studies to provide a welldefined methodology with which to approach this literary movement.

Disability Studies and Spanish Culture

Benjamin Fraser — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Disability Studies and Spanish Culture is the first book to apply the tenets of disability studies—in particular the study of mental disabilities—to Spanish cultural contexts, offering an assessment of disability as it is engaged by Spanish films, novels, comics, and other artworks. Innovatively bringing disability theory into dialogue with film and literary analysis, Benjamin Fraser shows how formal aspects of art and media in Spain highlight, frame, inform, and are informed by contemporary disability legislation there, as well as by disability advocacy, cultural perception, and social integration. By using the specific context of Spanish culture, he outlines broader shifts in social attitudes and theoretical understandings of disability.

Michel Houellebecq

Douglas Morrey — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Michel Houellebecq is one of the most successful and controversial contemporary French novelists. Translated worldwide, with three film adaptations of his works, he has also been at the center of a host of media scandals in France. In this book, Douglas Morrey examines Houellebecq’s stark representation of humanity—a terminal state of decadence and decline ripe for replacement by a posthuman successor—looking at the global significance of his visions at the same time that he situates them in the contexts of French literature, culture, and society.

Crime Fiction in the City

Lucy Andrew; Catherine Phelps — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Crime Fiction in the City: Capital Crimes expands upon previous studies of urban space and crime by reflecting on the treatment of the capital city—a repository of authority, national identity, and culture—within crime fiction. The essays examine a broad array of crime writing set in capital cities, from the nineteenth-century gothic city mysteries of Paris, London, and Rome, to contemporary fiction located in newly devolved centers of power like Cardiff, Dublin, Edinburgh, and Stockholm. The collection brings together academics and creative writers, including an opening reflective essay by Ian Rankin.

Five Words

Roland Greene — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Blood. Invention. Language. Resistance. World. Five ordinary words that do a great deal of conceptual work in everyday life and literature. In this original experiment in critical semantics, Roland Greene considers how these five words changed over the course of the sixteenth century and what their changes indicate about broader forces in science, politics, and other disciplines.

Greene discusses a broad swath of Renaissance and transatlantic literature—including Shakespeare, Cervantes, Camões, and Milton—in terms of the development of these words rather than works, careers, or histories. He creates a method for describing and understanding the semantic changes that occur, extending his argument to other words that operate in the same manner. Aiming to shift the conversation around Renaissance literature from current approaches to riskier enterprises, Greene also challenges semantic-historicist scholars, proposing a method that takes advantage of digital resources like full-text databases but still depends on the interpreter to fashion ideas out of ordinary language. Five Words is an innovative and accessible book that points the field of literary studies in an exciting new direction.

Rhythm of Thought

Jessica Wiskus — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Between present and past, visible and invisible, and sensation and idea, there is resonance—so philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued and so Jessica Wiskus explores in The Rhythm of Thought. Holding the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, the paintings of Paul Cézanne, the prose of Marcel Proust, and the music of Claude Debussy under Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological light, she offers innovative interpretations of some of these artists’ masterworks, in turn articulating a new perspective on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy.

More than merely recovering Merleau-Ponty’s thought, Wiskus thinks according to it. First examining these artists in relation to noncoincidence—as silence in poetry, depth in painting, memory in literature, and rhythm in music—she moves through an array of their artworks toward some of Merleau-Ponty’s most exciting themes: our bodily relationship to the world and the dynamic process of expression. She closes with an examination of synesthesia as an intertwining of internal and external realms and a call, finally, for philosophical inquiry as a mode of artistic expression. Structured like a piece of music itself, The Rhythm of Thought offers new contexts in which to approach art, philosophy, and the resonance between them.

Magical Tales

Diane Purkiss; Carolyne Larrington — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 05:00:00 GMT

A faun carrying an umbrella. A hobbit who makes his home in a hole in the ground. An ill-treated schoolboy with a secret and a scar. Fantasy is among the most beloved genres in children’s literature— and its offerings are often just as eagerly anticipated by adults. But how is it that writers like J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman are able to create such remarkable images?

Magical Tales traces the origin of the genre back through Norse mythology, Arthurian legend, and medieval literature. Drawing on manuscripts and rare books in the renowned collection of the Bodleian Library, the essays turn the spotlight on spell books; grimoires, or magical textbooks; and books of legend and myth whose themes writers like J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis incorporated into their work, inspiring generations of writers that extend to the present day. In serving as a source of inspiration for later literary works, the contributors show, myths and legends have themselves been altered in interesting ways.

Richly illustrated, Magical Tales offers an enchanting take on the development of this wildly popular genre.

Illustrating Shakespeare

Peter Whitfield — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

For centuries, artists have been drawn to the plays of Shakespeare, translating his lines into brushstrokes and interpreting his characters and scenes in their own vision. From Henry Fuseli’s Macbeth Consulting the Vision of the Armed Head and William Blake’s Brutus and the Ghost of Caesar to Eugène Delacroix’s Othello and Desdemona and John Millais’s Ophelia, these works will forever influence our reception of the Bard.

In Illustrating Shakespeare, Peter Whitfield draws on an extraordinary array of historical evidence to chronicle the way artists have embraced Shakespeare over the years. Whitfield shows how some artists succeeded in capturing the psychological truth of the dramas, while others merely dressed them up to suit the taste of their time. In addition, he reveals how the history of Shakespearean art parallels that of theater production. The artistic tradition spawned by Shakespeare’s plays is extremely important to his legacy, making this gorgeous volume a must-read for scholars and fans alike.

Literary Lacan

Santanu Biswas — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The relationship between literature and psychology is long and richly complex, and no more so than in the work of Jacques Lacan, the most controversial psychoanalyst since Freud. The Literary Lacan: From Literature to ‘Lituraterre’ and Beyond is dedicated to assessing Lacan’s significant contribution to literary studies and the contribution, in turn, of literature to Lacanian psychoanalysis.

The first essays in this collection provide close readings of Lacan’s literature-related work, specifically his work on Hamlet, his homage to Marguerite Duras and Lewis Carroll, his concept of Lituraterre, and his seminar on James Joyce. Other essays examine Lacan’s theories in conjunction with works of major writers such as Samuel Beckett. The book concludes with essays that investigate Lacan and literature more broadly, including the applicability of literature to psychoanalysis.

With well-known contributors including Slavoj Zizek, Jacques-Alain Miller, Russell Grigg and Ellie Ragland, this volume will appeal not only to specialists in literary and Lacanian theory but also to students and enthusiasts of the master and the literature that inspired him.

Female Gothic Histories

Diana Wallace — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Female Gothic Histories is an important new study of the ways in which women writers have used the gothic novel to symbolize and counter their exclusion from traditional historical narratives. Beginning with a detailed reading of Sophia Lee’s critically neglected The Recess, one of the earliest historical gothic fictions, Diana Wallace traces the development of this form from works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Vernon Lee, Daphne du Maurier, and the modern gothics of Victoria Holt, to the phenomenally popular novels of Sarah Waters.

George Eliot and the Gothic Novel

Royce Mahawatte — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

George Eliot and the Gothic Novel tracks George Eliot’s reading of gothic and sensational literature and her responses to them in her own works. Royce Mahawatte focuses on the frightening, startling, and melodramatic elements of Eliot’s fiction, placing Eliot within a culture of mid-Victorian sensationalism and highlighting the connections between her and authors like Mary Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and Edward Bulwer Lytton. Mahawatte argues that suspenseful and popular tropes play a significant role in Eliot’s literary ethics and creativity and that our understanding of the author’s writing needs to be broadened to include her extensive and complex engagement with the gothic tradition.

Spanish Civil War

Anindya Raychaudhuri — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

While the intricate relationship between history, memory, and representation is of central concern in contemporary society in general, it is perhaps more alive in Spain than in any other European country. The seventy-fifth anniversary of the Spanish Civil War has reignited interest in this field. The Spanish Civil War: Exhuming a Buried Past features cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research on the political, historical, cultural, and literary legacy of the Spanish Civil War by a mixture of new and leading scholars from Europe, North America, and New Zealand.

Occupy

W. J. T. Mitchell; Bernard E. Harcourt; Michael Taussig — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Mic check! Mic check! Lacking amplification in Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street protestors addressed one another by repeating and echoing speeches throughout the crowd. In Occupy, W. J. T. Mitchell, Bernard E. Harcourt, and Michael Taussig take the protestors’ lead and perform their own resonant call-and-response, playing off of each other in three essays that engage the extraordinary Occupy movement that has swept across the world, examining everything from self-immolations in the Middle East to the G8 crackdown in Chicago to the many protest signs still visible worldwide.

“You break through the screen like Alice in Wonderland,” Taussig writes in the opening essay, “and now you can’t leave or do without it.” Following Taussig’s artful blend of participatory ethnography and poetic meditation on Zuccotti Park, political and legal scholar Harcourt examines the crucial difference between civil and political disobedience. He shows how by effecting the latter—by rejecting the very discourse and strategy of politics—Occupy Wall Street protestors enacted a radical new form of protest. Finally, media critic and theorist Mitchell surveys the global circulation of Occupy images across mass and social media and looks at contemporary works by artists such as Antony Gormley and how they engage the body politic, ultimately examining the use of empty space itself as a revolutionary monument.

Occupy stands not as a primer on or an authoritative account of 2011’s revolutions, but as a snapshot, a second draft of history, beyond journalism and the polemics of the moment—an occupation itself.

Arbitrary Rule

Mary Nyquist — Fri, 10 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Slavery appears as a figurative construct during the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, and again in the American and French revolutions, when radicals represent their treatment as a form of political slavery. What, if anything, does figurative, political slavery have to do with transatlantic slavery? In Arbitrary Rule, Mary Nyquist explores connections between political and chattel slavery by excavating the tradition of Western political thought that justifies actively opposing tyranny. She argues that as powerful rhetorical and conceptual constructs, Greco-Roman political liberty and slavery reemerge at the time of early modern Eurocolonial expansion; they help to create racialized “free” national identities and their “unfree” counterparts in non-European nations represented as inhabiting an earlier, privative age.

Arbitrary Rule is the first book to tackle political slavery’s discursive complexity, engaging Eurocolonialism, political philosophy, and literary studies, areas of study too often kept apart. Nyquist proceeds through analyses not only of texts that are canonical in political thought—by Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes, and Locke—but also of literary works by Euripides, Buchanan, Vondel, Montaigne, and Milton, together with a variety of colonialist and political writings, with special emphasis on tracts written during the English revolution. She illustrates how “antityranny discourse,” which originated in democratic Athens, was adopted by republican Rome, and revived in early modern Western Europe, provided members of a “free” community with a means of protesting a threatened reduction of privileges or of consolidating a collective, political identity. Its semantic complexity, however, also enabled it to legitimize racialized enslavement and imperial expansion.

Throughout, Nyquist demonstrates how principles relating to political slavery and tyranny are bound up with a Roman jurisprudential doctrine that sanctions the power of life and death held by the slaveholder over slaves and, by extension, the state, its representatives, or its laws over its citizenry.

Dating the Sagas

Else Mundal — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Anonymously written and transcribed from oral tales, the family sagas of Iceland are notoriously difficult texts to date. In this book, a host of contributors address the methodological problems inherent in dating the sagas, and in the process they offer insightful discussions of the saga form itself. Focusing on the several new written genres that developed in Iceland in the thirteenth century, they locate the dynamic position of the sagas at the intersection of oral and written traditions. In doing so, they highlight the crucial problems of philological research and the importance of accuracy in understanding literary history.

Fabulous Feminist

Suniti Namjoshi — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The Fabulous Feminist brings together for the first time in one volume a vast range of renowned feminist thinker Suniti Namjoshi’s writings, starting with her most famous collection, Feminist Fables, and including excerpts from Saint Suniti and the Dragon, Mothers of Maya Dip, From the Bedside Book of Nightmares, and her series of “Aditi” books for children, such as Aditi and the Thames Dragon.

Here readers will find her fables, poetry, prose autobiography, and children’s stories, works that are both playful and deeply serious. In these beautifully composed and entertaining works, she ingeniously reworks fairytales, Greek and Sanskrit mythology, literary monsters such as Grendel’s Mother, and icons such as Saint Sebastian, all stitched together with her vivid imagination and wisdom. Writing with insight and wit about power, about inequality, and about oppression, Namjoshi brilliantly uses language and the literary tradition to expose what she finds absurd and unacceptable in modern life. This provocative and entertaining collection will be welcomed by Namjoshi’s fans and admirers of the feminist intellectual tradition.

Born in Mumbai in 1941, Suniti Namjoshi is an important figure in contemporary Indian literature in English, a writer whose deep engagement with issues of gender, sexual orientation, cultural identity and human rights infuses everything she writes.

Fantastic and European Gothic

Matthew Gibson — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

This fascinating study examines the rise of fantastic and frénétique literature in Europe during the nineteenth century, introducing readers to lesser-known writers like Paul Féval and Charles Nodier, whose vampires, ghouls, and doppelgängers were every bit as convincing as those of the more famous Bram Stoker and Ann Radcliffe, but whose political motivations were far more serious. Matthew Gibson demonstrates how these writers used the conventions of the Gothic to attack both the French Revolution and the rise of materialism and positivism during the Enlightenment. At the same time, Gibson challenges current understandings of the fantastic and the literature of terror as promulgated by critics like Tzvetan Todorov, David Punter, and Fred Botting.

Proust and the Visual

Nathalie Aubert — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

This edited collection considers the role of the visual in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and how it contributes to the novel’s sense of modernity. The first few essays examine the philosophical implications of Proust’s quest for truth, taking up analyses of the thing, the body, and the relation between the seer and the visible. The essays in the second section concentrate on the way meaning emerges from the description of experience, as well as the cultural environment in which it is inscribed through the workings and reworkings of certain images and textures. The final essays explore how Proust’s unique approach to the visual has become in recent years the inspiration for other visual practices: film, sculpture, painting, and dance.

Women's Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Melissa Edmundson Makala — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Throughout nineteenth-century Britain, female writers excelled within the genre of supernatural literature. Much of their short fiction and poetry uses ghosts as figures to symbolize the problems of gender, class, economics, and imperialism, thus making their supernatural literature something more than just a good scare. Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain recovers and analyzes for a new audience this “social supernatural” ghost literature, as well as the lives and literary careers of the women who wrote it.

Puss in Books

Catherine Britton — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Whether it’s a piano-playing cat, a surprised cat, or one that’s just plain adorable, some of the most-watched online videos these days feature funny felines. And it doesn’t end there; cats are ubiquitous on the Internet, inspiring meme after meme, speaking their own language, and even prompting the launch of a new film festival. But the omnipresence of the cat in pop culture is not novel. Feline references date from before 2000 BC in ancient Egypt, and since the introduction of cats to Western households they have inspired writers and artists—from the scribe of the Lindisfarne Gospels to poets of the present day.

Puss in Books is a celebration of feline wit, intelligence, aloofness, and charm as presented through cats in books, with examples from literature, folklore, and popular culture. Among the selections included in this gorgeous volume are nursery rhymes (“Hey Diddle Diddle”and “Ding Dong Bell”); poetry by Thomas Gray (“Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes”) and T. S. Eliot (Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats); cats in fiction by Rudyard Kipling, Lewis Carroll, and Charles Dickens; and contemporary feline characters such as Splat the Cat and, of course, the ubiquitous Puss in Boots himself.

Wonderfully illustrated in color throughout, Puss in Books is an ideal gift for every cat lover.

Spoken Word: William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin

The British Library — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The latest release in the British Library’s highly acclaimed Spoken Word series of authors in their own words, The Spoken Word: William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin is a rare collection of recordings featuring the American writer William S. Burroughs (1914–97) and the British-born artist Brion Gysin (1916–86), the man Burroughs credited with the invention of the “cut-up” literary technique. The centerpiece of the collection is a complete, previously unissued recording of Burroughs reading live in Liverpool in 1982. The disc also includes performances by Gysin of a selection of his “permutated poems,” as well as previously unheard home recordings made by the pair in Paris in 1970, all taken from tapes in the British Library collection.

Signature Derrida

Jacques Derrida; Jay Williams; Françoise Meltzer — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Throughout his long career, Jacques Derrida had a close, collaborative relationship with Critical Inquiry and its editors. He saved some of his most important essays for the journal, and he relished the ensuing arguments and polemics that stemmed from the responses to his writing that Critical Inquiry encouraged. Collecting the best of Derrida’s work that was published in the journal between 1980 and 2002, Signature Derrida provides a remarkable introduction to the philosopher and the evolution of his thought.

These essays define three significant “periods” in Derrida’s writing: his early, seemingly revolutionary phase; a middle stage, often autobiographical, that included spirited defense of his work; and his late period, when his persona as a public intellectual was prominent, and he wrote on topics such as animals and religion. The first period is represented by essays like “The Law of Genre,” in which Derrida produces a kind of phenomenological narratology. Another essay, “The Linguistic Circle of Geneva,” embodies the second, presenting deconstructionism at its best: Derrida shows that what was imagined to be an epistemological break in the study of linguistics was actually a repetition of earlier concepts. The final period of Derrida’s writing includes the essays “Of Spirit” and “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” and three eulogies to the intellectual legacies of Michel Foucault, Louis Marin, and Emmanuel Lévinas, in which Derrida uses the ideas of each thinker to push forward the implications of their theories.

With an introduction by Francoise Meltzer that provides an overview of the oeuvre of this singular philosopher, Signature Derrida is the most wide-ranging, and thus most representative, anthology of Derrida’s work to date.

Dreaming in French

Alice Kaplan — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

A year in Paris . . . since World War II, countless American students have been lured by that vision—and been transformed by their sojourn in the City of Light. Dreaming in French tells three stories of that experience, and how it changed the lives of three extraordinary American women.

All three women would go on to become icons, key figures in American cultural, intellectual, and political life, but when they embarked for France, they were young, little-known, uncertain about their future, and drawn to the culture, sophistication, and drama that only Paris could offer. Yet their backgrounds and their dreams couldn’t have been more different. Jacqueline Bouvier was a twenty-year-old debutante, a Catholic girl from a wealthy East Coast family. Susan Sontag was twenty-four, a precocious Jewish intellectual from a North Hollywood family of modest means, and Paris was a refuge from motherhood, a failing marriage, and graduate work in philosophy at Oxford. Angela Davis, a French major at Brandeis from a prominent African American family in Birmingham, Alabama, found herself the only black student in her year abroad program—in a summer when all the news from Birmingham was of unprecedented racial violence.

Kaplan takes readers into the lives, hopes, and ambitions of these young women, tracing their paths to Paris and tracking the discoveries, intellectual adventures, friendships, and loves that they found there. For all three women, France was far from a passing fancy; rather, Kaplan shows, the year abroad continued to influence them, a significant part of their intellectual and cultural makeup, for the rest of their lives. Jackie Kennedy carried her love of France to the White House and to her later career as a book editor, bringing her cultural and linguistic fluency to everything from art and diplomacy to fashion and historic restoration—to the extent that many, including Jackie herself, worried that she might seem “too French.” Sontag found in France a model for the life of the mind that she was determined to lead; the intellectual world she observed from afar during that first year in Paris inspired her most important work and remained a key influence—to be grappled with, explored, and transcended—the rest of her life. Davis, meanwhile, found that her Parisian vantage strengthened her sense of political exile from racism at home and brought a sense of solidarity with Algerian independence. For her, Paris was a city of political commitment, activism, and militancy, qualities that would deeply inform her own revolutionary agenda and soon make her a hero to the French writers she had once studied.

Kaplan, whose own junior year abroad played a prominent role in her classic memoir, French Lessons, spins these three quite different stories into one evocative biography, brimming with the ferment and yearnings of youth and shot through with the knowledge of how a single year—and a magical city—can change a whole life. No one who has ever dreamed of Paris should miss it.

States of Emergency

Stephen Morton — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

States of Emergency examines how violent anticolonial struggles and the legal, military, and political techniques employed by colonial governments to contain them have been imagined in both literary and legal narratives. Through a series of case studies, Stephen Morton considers how colonial states of emergency have been defined and represented in the contexts of Ireland, India, South Africa, Algeria, Kenya, and Israel- Palestine, concluding with a compelling assessment of the continuities between colonial states of emergency and the war on terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Roland Barthes at the Collège de France

Lucy O'Meara — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Roland Barthes at the Collège de France studies the four lecture courses given by Roland Barthes in Paris between 1977 and 1980, placing Barthes’s teaching within institutional, intellectual, and personal contexts. Theoretically wide-ranging, Lucy O’Meara’s account focuses on Barthes’s pedagogical style and the insights they provide into his written works, including his focus on essayism and fragmentation and the negotiation between singularity and universality. Linking Barthes’s strategies to broad intellectual influences, from Kant and Adorno to Zen and Taoist philosophies, O’Meara reassesses Barthes’s critical and ethical priorities in the decade before his death, highlighting the vitality of his late thought.