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Machado de Assis
Reflections on a Brazilian Master Writer
By Richard Graham
University of Texas Press, 1999

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) never left Brazil and rarely traveled outside his native city of Rio de Janeiro, yet he is widely acknowledged by those who have read him as one of the major authors of the nineteenth century. His works are full of subtle irony, relentless psychological insights, and brilliant literary innovations. Yet, because he wrote in Portuguese, a language outside the mainstream of Western culture, those with access to his writings are relatively few.

This book is designed not only to call new attention to this master but also to raise questions about the nature of literature itself and current alternative views on how it can be approached. Four essays address the question of Machado's "realism" in the five masterpiece novels of his maturity, especially Dom Casmurro. The noted contributors include John Gledson (University of Liverpool), João Adolfo Hansen (Universidade de São Paulo), Sidney Chalhoub (Universidade de Campinas), and Daphne Patai (University of Massachusetts at Amherst).

Dain Borges of the University of California at San Diego says, "[This is the] only collection explicitly debating the question that polarizes contemporary Brazilian criticism of Machado de Assis: was he a sophisticated late realist, or was he a pioneering anti-realist, even a postmodernist? The [essayists] marshal their evidence and argument with virtuosity and arrive at sharply opposing conclusions."

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A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism
Machado de Assis
Roberto Schwarz
Duke University Press, 2001
A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism is a translation (from the original Portuguese) of Roberto Schwarz’s renowned study of the work of Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis (1839–1908). A leading Brazilian theorist and author of the highly influential notion of “misplaced ideas,” Schwarz focuses his literary and cultural analysis on Machado’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, which was published in 1880. Writing in the Marxist tradition, Schwarz investigates in particular how social structure gets internalized as literary form, arguing that Machado’s style replicates and reveals the deeply embedded class divisions of nineteenth-century Brazil.
Widely acknowledged as the most important novelist to have written in Latin America before 1940, Machado had a surprisingly modern style. Schwarz notes that the unprecedented wit, sarcasm, structural inventiveness, and mercurial changes of tone and subject matter found in The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas marked a crucial moment in the history of Latin American literature. He argues that Machado’s vanguard narrative reflects the Brazilian owner class and its peculiar status in both national and international contexts, and shows why this novel’s success was no accident. The author was able to confront some of the most prestigious ideologies of the nineteenth century with some uncomfortable truths, not the least of which was that slavery remained the basis of the Brazilian economy.
A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism will appeal to those with interests in Latin American literature, nineteenth century history, and Marxist literary theory.

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Machado de Assis and Narrative Theory
Language, Imitation, Art, and Verisimilitude in the Last Six Novels
Earl E. Fitz
Bucknell University Press, 2019
This book makes the argument that Machado de Assis, hailed as one of Latin American literature’s greatest writers, was also a major theoretician of the modern novel form. Steeped in the works of Western literature and an imaginative reader of French Symbolist poetry, Machado creates, between 1880 and 1908, a “new narrative,” one that will presage the groundbreaking theories of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure by showing how even the language of narrative cannot escape being elusive and ambiguous in terms of meaning. It is from this discovery about the nature of language as a self-referential semiotic system that Machado crafts his “new narrative.” Long celebrated in Brazil as a dazzlingly original writer, Machado has struggled to gain respect and attention outside the Luso-Brazilian ken. He is the epitome of the “outsider” or “marginal,” the iconoclastic and wildly innovative genius who hails from a culture rarely studied in the Western literary hierarchy and so consigned to the status of “eccentric.” Had the Brazilian master written not in Portuguese but English, French, or German, he would today be regarded as one of the true exemplars of the modern novel, in expression as well as in theory.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Machado de Assis
Toward a Poetics of Emulation
João Cezar de Castro Rocha
Michigan State University Press, 2015
This book offers an alternative explanation for one of the core dilemmas of Brazilian literary criticism: the “midlife crisis” Machado de Assis underwent from 1878 to 1880, the result of which was the writing of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, as well as the remarkable production of his mature years—with an emphasis on his masterpiece, Dom Casmurro.

At the center of this alternative explanation, Castro Rocha situates the fallout from the success enjoyed by Eça de Queirós with the publication of Cousin Basílio and Machado’s two long texts condemning the author and his work. Literary and aesthetic rivalries come to the fore, allowing for a new theoretical framework based on a literary appropriation of “thick description,” the method proposed by anthropologist Clifford Geertz. From this method, Castro Rocha derives his key hypothesis: an unforeseen consequence of Machado’s reaction to Eça’s novel was a return to the classical notion of aemulatio, which led Machado to develop a “poetics of emulation.”
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The Athenaeum
A Novel
Raul Pompeia, Translated from the Portuguese by Renata R. M. Wasserman with an Introduction by César Braga-Pinto
Northwestern University Press, 2015

Originally published as O Ateneu in 1888, The Athenaeum is a classic of Brazilian literature, here translated into English in its entirety for the first time. The first-person narrator, Sergio, looks back to his time at the eponymous boarding school, with its au­tocratic principal and terrifying student body. Sergio’s account of his humiliating experiences as a student, with its frank discus­sion of corruption and homoerotic bullying, makes it clear that his school is structured and administered so as to reproduce the class divisions and power structure of the larger Brazilian society.

In its muckraking mode, the novel is in the spirit of Natural­ism, imported from France and well-acclimated to Brazil, where it blossomed. At the same time, Pompéia maintains the novel’s credibility as a bildungsroman by portraying the narrator’s psy­chological development. The novel’s conclusion suggests both a doomed society and its possible redemption, indicative of a mo­ment of upheaval and transition in Brazilian history.

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Stella Manhattan
Silviano Santiago
Duke University Press, 1994
Twice the winner of the Brazilian national book award, Silviano Santiago caused a sensation in 1985 with the publication of Stella Manhattan, a story of sexual scandal and political intrigue. Set in the Brazilian exile community in New York City in the late 1960s, this noir novel is an electrifying adventure story of a young gay Brazilian man trying to make a go of it in New York.
After being forced from his native country by an unforgiving father who embodies the authoritarian temper of the Brazilian dictatorship and is embarrassed by his son’s homosexuality and transvestism, Stella Manhattan, alter ego of Eduardo da Costa e Silva, lands a job in the Brazilian consulate with the help of his father’s friend, Colonel Valdevinos Vianna. Eduardo is also recruited by Vianna to help him bring his own alter ego, the sadomasochist Black Widow, out of the closet. Transformed by black leather, the Black Widow cruises the streets and bars of New York in search of American flesh. Surrounding the relationship between these two men is a group of Brazilian guerrillas who attempt to press Eduardo into their service in order to entrap the colonel. The guerrillas are at the center of a network of revolutionaries, from the Cubans to the Black Panthers and the Young Lords. Virtually apolitical, Eduardo/Stella is drawn by desire into the conflict between the Brazilian government and its communist opposition.
Eduardo also gets caught in the designs of other memorable characters of various sexual and political persuasions: the reactionary professor Aníbal, confined to a wheelchair, who enjoys watching his wife Leila make love with men she picks up on the street; and Paco, alias La Cucaracha, a flamboyant queen, a rabid anti-Castro Cuban exile, and the most sympathetic of this gallery of outcasts.
Working through two complex themes—politics and sex—Santiago sets the action in New York to emphasize the interaction of the seemingly contradictory impulses of liberation and Americanization that Brazil underwent in the late 1960s. As in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, political and sexual liberation cut two ways—neither one necessarily compatible with the other. Exploring the complexities of repression that affect all forms of identity, Santiago mingles tragedy and farce as international intrigues are played out in New York’s Latino and black neighborhoods, and the genteel world of international diplomacy is thrust into the milieu of urban gay street life.
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Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga?
A B-Novel
By Caio Fernando Abreu
University of Texas Press, 2001

A forty-year-old Brazilian journalist reduced to living in a dilapidated building inhabited by a bizarre human fauna—fortune-tellers, transvestites, tango-loving Argentinean hustlers—is called upon to track down and write the story of Dulce Veiga, a famous singer who disappeared twenty years earlier on the eve of her first big show. Thus begins a mad race through an underground, nocturnal São Paulo among rock bands with eccentric names, feline reincarnations of Vita Sackville-West, ex-revolutionaries turned junkies, gay Pietas, echoes of Afro-Brazilian religions, and intimations of AIDS . . .

Constructed like a mystery, the novel unravels over a week, evoking a decadent and contaminated atmosphere in which the journalist's own search for meaning finds its expression in the elusive Dulce Veiga, who constantly appears to him as if in a dream, her arm pointing heavenward. Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga? is a descent into the underworld of contemporary megalopolises where, like the inside of a huge TV, life intermingles with bits of music, film clips, and soap opera characters in a crazy and macabre dance, moving toward a possible catharsis.

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Winning the Game and Other Stories
Rubem Fonseca
Tagus Press, 2013
In these seventeen stories by one of Brazil's foremost living authors, Fonseca introduces readers—with unsurpassed candor and keenness of observation—to a kaleidoscopic, often disturbing world. A hunchback sets his lascivious sights on seducing a beautiful woman. A wealthy businessman hires a ghost writer, with unexpected results. A family of modern-day urban cannibals celebrates a bizarre rite of passage. A man roams the nocturnal streets of Rio de Janeiro in search of meaning. A male ex-police reporter writes an advice column under a female pseudonym. A prosperous entrepreneur picks up a beautiful girl in his Mercedes only to discover his costly mistake. A loser elaborates a lethal plan to become, in his mind, a winner.
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Crimes of August
A Novel
Rubem Fonseca
Tagus Press, 2014
Rubem Fonseca's Crimes of August offers the first serious literary treatment of the cataclysmic events of August 1954, arguably the most turbulent month in Brazilian history. A rich novel, both culturally and historically, Crimes of August tells two stories simultaneously. The first is private, involving the well-delineated character of Alberto Mattos, a police officer. The other is public, focusing on events that begin with the attempted assassination of Carlos Lacerda, a demagogic journalist and political enemy of President Getúlio Vargas, and culminate in Vargas's suicide on August 24,1954. Throughout this suspenseful novel, deceptively couched as a thriller, Fonseca interweaves fact and fiction in a complex, provocative plot. At the same time, he re-creates the atmosphere of the 1950s, when Rio de Janeiro was Brazil's capital and the nexus of political intrigue and corruption. Mattos is assigned to solve the brutal murder of a wealthy entrepreneur in the aftermath of what appears to be a homosexual liaison. An educated and introspective man, and one of the few in his precinct not on the take from the bankers" of the illegal lottery, Mattos suffers from alienation and a bleeding ulcer. His investigation puts him on a dangerous collision course with the conspiracy to depose Vargas, the novel's other narrative thread. The two overlap at several points, coming to their tragic end with the aged politician's suicide and Mattos's downfall.
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Freedom Sun in the Tropics
Ana Maria Machado, Translated by Renata R. M. Wasserman
Tagus Press, 2020
Based upon the author's own experiences of life, exile, and return under the dictatorship that gripped Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s, Freedom Sun in the Tropics follows Lena, a journalist, as she resists violence and political repression, and decides to flee to Paris. Upon her eventual return, Lena soon discovers that the dictatorship's prison walls have enclosed private lives and hold strong even after the collapse of authoritarianism. With friendship, truth, and family broken, she struggles to make the difficult return to freedom and regain a sense of life—and simple decency—on the other side of trauma. Originally published in 1988, Ana Maria Machado's novel vividly captures one of the darkest periods in recent Brazilian history.
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Rare and Commonplace Flowers
The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares
Oliveira, Carmen
Rutgers University Press, 2003

A Stonewall Honor Book of the American Library Association's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table​

Rare and Commonplace Flowers—a Brazilian bestseller—tells the story of two women. Elizabeth Bishop, the Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet, sought artistic inspiration in Brazil. There she met and fell in love with Lota de Macedo Soares, a self-trained Brazilian architect. This dual biography—brilliantly researched, and written in a lively, novelistic style—follows their relationship from 1951 to 1967, the time when the two lived together in Brazil. The fact that these two women had an intimate relationship caused an uproar when it first came to public notice.

The relationship started out happily, yet ended tragically. In 1961, Soares became increasingly obsessed with building and administering Flamengo Park, Rio de Janeiro’s equivalent to New York City’s Central Park. Though she had been the driving force behind the park’s inception, the ultimate credit that was due her was stripped away because of petty politics and chicanery. As Soares’s career declined and Bishop’s flourished, their relationship crumbled.

Rare and Commonplace Flowers is a tale of two artists and two cultures, offering unique perspectives on both women and their work. Carmen L. Oliveira provides an unparalleled level of detail and insight, due to both her familiarity with Brazil as well as her access to the country’s artistic elite, many of whom had a direct connection with Bishop and Soares. Rare pictures of the two artists and their home bring this unique story to life.

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Ex-Voto
Poems of Adélia Prado
Adélia Prado
Tupelo Press, 2013
“Adélia Prado’s most recent collection of poems, once more in Ellen Doré Watson’s superbly energetic and natural English, is nothing like any poetry I know in our present moment. Her humor, her dancing solidity, her joy in being alive — I think back to Chaucer, and the poems of Grace Paley. Prado is similarly voluble, playful, down to earth, and cheerful; and she seems to have an uncannily easy-going, even merry relationship with God and all his family. She has given us a perfectly crystalline ex-voto.”—Jean Valentine. Ex-Voto is the second collection of Prado’s poetry translated by Ellen Doré Watson. Their previous collaborative volume, The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), was abundantly praised: “The life captured in Prado’s poems is convulsive: from a dark corner of despair she can rocket to pure joy in one line… This is poetry at its hottest and most naked…”—James Tate
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Ursula
Maria Firmina dos Reis, Translated by Cristina Ferreira Pinto-Bailey
Tagus Press, 2021
Written within the literary conventions of the Romantic movement and published decades before other Brazilian abolitionist novels, Ursula (1859) offers a sensitive and nuanced portrayal of enslaved African and Afro-Brazilian characters. While readers follow the story of the plantation owner's daughter Ursula, her doomed romance with Tancredo, and her uncle's diabolical schemes to entrap her in marriage, the novel's power lies in Reis's characterization of the enslaved Africans Tulio, Susana, and Antero. Shown in all their humanity as they narrate their personal histories and give voice to the abuse and injustices they have endured, these characters tell of the horrors of the Middle Passage, the daily indignities they face, and the brutality of their masters.
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First World Third Class and Other Tales of the Global Mix
By Regina Rheda
University of Texas Press, 2005

Regina Rheda is a contemporary award-winning Brazilian writer whose original voice and style have won her many admirers. First World Third Class and Other Tales of the Global Mix presents some of her finest and most representative work to an English-speaking readership. Stories from the Copan Building consists of eight tales set in a famous residential building in São Paulo. The stories, like the apartment complex, are a microcosm of modern-day urban Brazil. They are witty, consistently caustic, and never predictable.

Also in this volume is the poignant and often hilarious novel First World Third Class. It depicts young middle-class professionals and artists who, as opportunities in Brazil diminished, opted to leave their country, even if it meant taking menial jobs abroad. At the center of the narrative is Rita, a thirty-year-old aspiring filmmaker who migrates to England, and then Italy. She looks for work and love in all the wrong places, moving from city to city and from bed to bed.

The last three stories in this collection also happen to be among the author's most recent. "The Enchanted Princess" is an ironic title for a postfeminist tale of a South American woman being wooed to marry an old-world gentleman who promises to take care of her every need. "The Sanctuary" concerns the living conditions of immigrant workers and farm animals. Equally piquant in nature, "The Front" deals with ecology, labor environments, and gender politics.

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Eden-Brazil
Moacyr Scliar, Translated by Malcolm K. McNee
Tagus Press, 2019
Adamastor is a freshly divorced, frustrated bureaucrat trying to reinvent his life. Richie is a young, struggling actor. Together with Ernesto, a rakish, expat Argentine showman, they create Eden-Brazil, an ecotourism destination in a stunning swath of coastal rainforest. Inspired to provide visitors with the ultimate return to nature, they decide to stage the biblical story of the Garden of Eden, complete with Adam, Eve, snake, apple, the works. But recreating an earthly paradise as something more than another roadside attraction is no easy feat. In this charming, tragicomic tale, Moacyr Scliar employs his signature humor and talent for crisp storytelling, weaving together a playfully serious parable of environmentalist ideals clashing with the realities of local politics, global consumer culture, and competing visions of authentic nature., reviewing a previous edition or volume
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The Eternal Son
Cristovão Tezza
Tagus Press, 2013
In this multi-award-winning autobiographical novel, Cristovão Tezza draws readers into the mind of a young father whose son, Felipe, is born with Down syndrome. From the initial shock of diagnosis, and through his growing understanding of the world of hospitals and therapies, Tezza threads the story of his son's life with his own. Felipe, who lives in an eternal present, becomes a remarkable young man; for Tezza, however, the story is a settling of accounts with himself and his own limitations and ultimately a coming to terms with the sublime ironies and arbitrariness of life. He struggles with the phantom of shame, as if his son's condition were an indication of his own worth, and yearns for a "normal" world that is always out of reach. Reading this compelling book is like stumbling through a trapdoor into the writer's mind, where nothing is censored and everything is constantly examined and reinterpreted.
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The Only Happy Ending for a Love Story Is an Accident
J. P. Cuenca
Tagus Press, 2013
Set in Tokyo, in a not-too-distant future, this novel tells the story of Shunsuke, a salaryman, and his complicated relationship with his mad poet father, Mr. Okuda, whose hobby is spying on his son. When Shunsuke falls in love with Iulana, a maelstrom of jealousy is set in motion that culminates in abduction and death. In poetic and imaginative language, Cuenca subtly interweaves reality and fiction, creating a dreamlike world whose palpable characters, including a silicone doll, leave a lasting impression. Written like a crime novel, full of odd events and reminiscent of Haruki Murakami's work, this disturbing, kaleidoscopic story of voyeurism and perversion draws the reader in from the very first page.
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Unremembering Me
Luiz Ruffato
Tagus Press, 2018
Inspired by his own family's struggles, as well as the broader sociopolitical and economic forces that shaped Brazil in the 1970s, Luiz Ruffato's epistolary novel, Unremembering Me, traces the story of the narrator's older brother. Leaving behind his parents and younger siblings in order to assume financial responsibility for his family, Célio, a young factory hand from Cataguases, Minas Gerais, goes to work in industrial São Paulo. His letters home convey details about his work, living situation, adjustments to urban life, and fierce homesickness, even as they point to growing political unrest under the military dictatorship and Célio's increasing participation as a union organizer.
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Ualalapi
Fragments from the End of Empire
Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa
Tagus Press, 2017
Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa first published Ualalapi: Fragments from the End of Empire in Portuguese in 1987. Named one of Africa's hundred best books of the twentieth century, it reflects on Mozambique's past and present through interconnected narratives related to the last ruler of the Gaza Empire, Ngungunhane. Defeated by the Portuguese in 1895, Ngungunhane was reclaimed for propaganda purposes by Mozambique's post-independence government as a national and nationalist hero. The regime celebrated his resistance to the colonial occupation of southern Mozambique as a precursor to the twentieth-century struggle for independence. In Ualalapi, Ungulani challenges that ideological celebration and portrays Ngungunhane as a despot, highlighting the violence and tyranny that were hallmarks of the Gaza Empire. This fresh look at the history of late nineteenth-century southeast Africa provides a prism through which to examine the machinations of those in power in Mozambique during the 1980s.
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Chiquinho
A Novel of Cabo Verde
Baltazar Lopes
Tagus Press, 2019
Originally published in Portuguese in 1947, Baltazar Lopes's Chiquinho offers a rich and compelling exploration of Cabo Verde's unique identity. Tracing the arc of its young protagonist's life as he approaches adulthood, the novel follows Chiquinho as he leaves his village, journeys to São Vicente Island to further his education, returns home as drought and famine strike the archipelago, and makes the difficult decision to join his father in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Reflecting the challenges faced by the Creole intellectuals of the so­called Claridade generation, this long­overdue English translation of Chiquinho is sure to appeal to academic audiences as well as the general reader.
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Close Reading
The Reader
Frank Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois, eds.
Duke University Press, 2003
An anthology of exemplary readings by some of the twentieth century’s foremost literary critics, Close Reading presents a wide range of responses to the question at the heart of literary criticism: how best to read a text to understand its meaning. The lively introduction and the selected essays provide an overview of close reading from New Criticism through poststructuralism, including works of feminist criticism, postcolonial theory, queer theory, new historicism, and more.

From a 1938 essay by John Crowe Ransom through the work of contemporary scholars, Close Reading highlights the interplay between critics—the ways they respond to and are influenced by others’ works. To facilitate comparisons of methodology, the collection includes discussions of the same primary texts by scholars using different critical approaches. The essays focus on Hamlet, “Lycidas,” “The Rape of the Lock,” Ulysses, Invisible Man, Beloved, Jane Austen, John Keats, and Wallace Stevens and reveal not only what the contributors are reading, but also how they are reading.

Frank Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois’s collection is an essential tool for teaching the history and practice of close reading.

Contributors. Houston A. Baker Jr., Roland Barthes, Homi Bhabha, R. P. Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, Kenneth Burke, Paul de Man, Andrew DuBois, Stanley Fish, Catherine Gallagher, Sandra Gilbert, Stephen Greenblatt, Susan Gubar, Fredric Jameson, Murray Krieger, Frank Lentricchia, Franco Moretti, John Crowe Ransom, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Helen Vendler

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Cultural Capital
The Problem of Literary Canon Formation
John Guillory
University of Chicago Press, 1993
John Guillory challenges the most fundamental premises of the canon debate by resituating the problem of canon formation in an entirely new theoretical framework. The result is a book that promises to recast not only the debate about the literary curriculum but also the controversy over "multiculturalism" and the current "crisis of the humanities." Employing concepts drawn from Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, Guillory argues that canon formation must be understood less as a question of the representation of social groups than as a question of the distribution of "cultural capital" in the schools, which regulate access to literacy, to the practices of reading and writing.
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Cultural Capital
The Problem of Literary Canon Formation
John Guillory
University of Chicago Press, 2023
An enlarged edition to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of John Guillory’s formative text on the literary canon.

Since its publication in 1993, John Guillory’s Cultural Capital has been a signal text for understanding the codification and uses of the literary canon. Cultural Capital reconsiders the social basis for aesthetic judgment and exposes the unequal distribution of symbolic and linguistic knowledge on which culture has long been based. Drawing from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, Guillory argues that canon formation must be understood less as a question of the representation of social groups and more as a question of the distribution of cultural capital in schools, which regulate access to literacy, to the practices of reading and writing.
 
Now, as the crisis of the canon has evolved into the so-called crisis of the humanities, Guillory’s groundbreaking, incisive work has never been more urgent. As scholar and critic Merve Emre writes in her introduction to this enlarged edition: “Exclusion, selection, reflection, representation—these are the terms on which the canon wars of the last century were fought, and the terms that continue to inform debates about, for instance, decolonizing the curriculum and the rhetoric of antiracist pedagogy.”
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The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture
George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1998
Most readers think of a written work as producing its meaning through the words it contains. But what is the significance of the detailed and beautiful illuminations on a medieval manuscript? Of the deliberately chosen typefaces in a book of poems by Yeats? Of the design and layout of text in an electronic format? How does the material form of a work shape its understanding in a particular historical moment, in a particular culture?
The material features of texts as physical artifacts--their "bibliographic codes" --have over the last decade excited increasing interest in a variety of disciplines. The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture gathers essays by an extraordinarily distinguished group of scholars to offer the most comprehensive examination of these issues yet, drawing on examples from literature, history, the fine arts, and philosophy.
Fittingly, the volume contains over two dozen illustrations that display the iconic features of the works analyzed--from Alfred the Great's Boethius through medieval manuscripts to the philosophy of C. S. Peirce and the dustjackets on works by F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Styron.
The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture will be groundbreaking reading for scholars in a wide range of fields.
George Bornstein is C. A. Patrides Professor of English, University of Michigan. Theresa Tinkle is Associate Professor of English, University of Michigan.
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Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History
John B. Clayton
University of Wisconsin Press, 1991

This important collection explores and clarifies two of the most contested ideas in literary theory today, influence and intertextuality.  The study of influence tends to center on major authors and canonical works, identifying prior documents as “sources” or “contexts” for a given author.  Intertextuality, on the other hand, is a concept unconcerned with authors as individuals; it treats all texts as part of a network of discourse that includes culture, history, and social practices as well as other literary works.  In thirteen essays drawing on the entire spectrum of English and American literary history, this volume considers the relationship between these two terms—their rivalry, their kinship, their range of uses.
    Debates about these two concepts have been crucial to the “new historicism” and the resurgence of interest in literary history.  The essays in this volume employ a refreshing array of examples from that history—poetry of the Renaissance and the twentieth century, novels of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, Old English texts, and postmodernist productions that have served as recurrent “intertexts” for contemporary theory.  The contributors treat such currently vital questions as the role of the author, canon formation, gender, causality, and the social dimension of texts.  They illuminate old assumptions and new ideas about agency that lie behind notions of influence, and they examine models of an anonymous textual field that lie behind notions of intertextuality.
    The volume takes much of its character from its own intertextual origin as a group project of the English faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.  Though diverse in their academic interests, concerns, and experience, the contributors particpated in an ongoing intellectual exchange that is a model of how new scholarship can arise from dialogue.

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The Margins of the Text
D. C. Greetham, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1997
These days, the margins have become a powerful position from which to mount a critique of contemporary society, culture, and text. From gay and lesbian studies to postcolonial or "subaltern" criticism, formerly marginalized perspectives have brought provocative new insights into many fields of inquiry. But until comparatively recently, the extremely powerful, even culture-defining, discourse of textual editing has been immune to such influences.
The Margins of the Text is the first attempt to collect a body of essays concerned with specific aspects of the marginal as they relate to text. The volume is divided into two sections. The first part assembles essays concerned with the margins of textual discourse and explores the function of discourses not previously recognized as significant to scholarly editing, such as those of class, race, gender, and sexual orientation. The second section attends to the textual margins in the bibliographical sense--the margins of the book, in which there has been so much recent interest. The two parts of the collection are clearly interrelated, since both study the effects of margins as a form of cultural discourse.
As a whole, the collection spans several periods (medieval, Renaissance, eighteenth-century to modern), several disciplines (drama, literature, art history, politics, and philosophy), and offers a wide-ranging consideration of a single topic as it is manifested in various genres, formats, and media. The contributors are among the most respected textual/critical theorists in their fields.
The Margins of the Text will become a standard reference in the field, and will be read profitably by culture critics and social historians as well as textual critics and editors.
D. C. Greetham is Professor of English and Medieval Studies, City University of New York Graduate School.
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Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory
David Simpson
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Why has Anglo-American culture for so long regarded "theory" with intense suspicion? In this important contribution to the history of critical theory, David Simpson argues that a nationalist myth underlies contemporary attacks on theory. Theory's antagonists, Simpson shows, invoke the same criteria of common sense and national solidarity as did the British intellectuals who rebelled against "theory" and "method" during the French Revolution.

Simpson demonstrates the close association between "theory" and "method" and shows that by the mid-eighteenth century, "method" had acquired distinctly subversive associations in England. Attributed increasingly to the French and the Germans, "method" paradoxically evoked images both of inhuman rationality and unbridled sentimentality; in either incarnation, it was seen as a threat to what was claimed to be authentically British. Simpson develops these paradigms in relation to feminism, the gendering of Anglo-American culture, and the emergence of literature and literary criticism as antitheoretical discourses. He then looks at the Romantic poets' response to this confining ideology of the cultural role of literature. Finally, Simpson considers postmodern theory's claims for the radical energy of nonrational or antirationalist positions.

This is an essential book not only for students of the Romantic period and intellectual historians concerned with the idea of "method," but for anyone interested in the historical background of today's debates over the excesses and possibilities of "theory."

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The Teaching Archive
A New History for Literary Study
Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan
University of Chicago Press, 2021
The Teaching Archive shows us a series of major literary thinkers in a place we seldom remember them inhabiting: the classroom. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan open up “the teaching archive”—the syllabuses, course descriptions, lecture notes, and class assignments—of critics and scholars including T. S. Eliot, Caroline Spurgeon, I. A. Richards, Edith Rickert, J. Saunders Redding, Edmund Wilson, Cleanth Brooks, Josephine Miles, and Simon J. Ortiz. This new history of English rewrites what we know about the discipline by showing how students helped write foundational works of literary criticism and how English classes at community colleges and HBCUs pioneered the reading methods and expanded canons that came only belatedly to the Ivy League. It reminds us that research and teaching, which institutions often imagine as separate, have always been intertwined in practice. In a contemporary moment of humanities defunding, the casualization of teaching, and the privatization of pedagogy, The Teaching Archive offers a more accurate view of the work we have done in the past and must continue to do in the future.
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Professions
Conversations on the Future of Literary and Cultural Studies
Edited by Donald E. Hall
University of Illinois Press, 2001
Sometimes playful, always provocative, Professions is a collection of searching and candid conversations--ranging from dialogues to tongue-in-cheek diatribes--on the issues that face literary and cultural critics today.
 
This volume bares professional concerns, relationships, ambitions, and insecurities about working in academe. Professions provides hard-to-get insider information for students contemplating an academic career. It also challenges professional scholars to retrieve the intellectual curiosity that drew them to scholarship in the first place while demonstrating how disagreement on controversial issues can be conducted with respect, good humor, and an open mind.
 
Professions features:
 
Jane Tompkins and Gerald Graff
John McGowan and Regenia Gagnier
James Phelan and James Kincaid
Marjorie Perloff and Robert von Hallberg
Judith Jackson Fossett and Kevin Gaines
Dennis W. Allen and Judith Roof
Niko Pfund, Gordon Hutner, and Martha Banta
Geoffrey Galt Harpham
Donald E. Hall and Susan S. Lanser
J. Hillis Miller, Herbert Lindenberger, Sandra Gilbert, Bonnie Zimmerman, Nellie Y. McKay, and Elaine Marks
 
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Nowhere Near the Line
Pain and Possibility in Teaching and Writing
Elizabeth H. Boquet
Utah State University Press, 2016
“When I was starting College Presidents for Gun Safety, one of the concerns I heard was the idea that there were just too many issues on which to articulate an opinion. Where would it stop? Where would we draw the line? . . . In light of this latest tragedy, on a college campus that could have been any of ours, I would say: ‘We are nowhere near the line yet.’” (Lawrence Schall, quoted in “Tragedy at Umpqua,” by Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed, October 2, 2015)
 
In this short work, Elizabeth Boquet explores the line Lawrence Schall describes above, tracing the overlaps and intersections of a lifelong education around guns and violence, as a student, a teacher, a feminist, a daughter, a wife, a citizen and across the dislocations and relocations that are part of a life lived in and around school. Weaving narratives of family, the university classroom and administration, her husband’s work as a police officer, and her work with students and the Poetry for Peace effort that her writing center sponsors in the local schools, she recounts her efforts to respond to moments of violence with a pedagogy of peace. “Can we not acknowledge that our experiences with pain anywhere should render us more, not less, capable of responding to it everywhere?” she asks. “Compassion, it seems to me, is an infinitely renewable resource.”
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Prospero's Son
Life, Books, Love, and Theater
Seth Lerer
University of Chicago Press, 2013
“This book is the record of a struggle between two temperaments, two consciousnesses and almost two epochs.” That’s how Edmund Gosse opened Father and Son, the classic 1907 book about his relationship with his father. Seth Lerer’s Prospero’s Son is, as fits our latter days, altogether more complicated, layered, and multivalent, but at its heart is that same problem: the fraught relationship between fathers and sons.
 
At the same time, Lerer’s memoir is about the power of books and theater, the excitement of stories in a young man’s life, and the transformative magic of words and performance. A flamboyantly performative father, a teacher and lifelong actor, comes to terms with his life as a gay man. A bookish boy becomes a professor of literature and an acclaimed expert on the very children’s books that set him on his path in the first place. And when that boy grows up, he learns how hard it is to be a father and how much books can, and cannot, instruct him. Throughout these intertwined accounts of changing selves, Lerer returns again and again to stories—the ways they teach us about discovery, deliverance, forgetting, and remembering.
 
“A child is a man in small letter,” wrote Bishop John Earle in the seventeenth century. “His father hath writ him as his own little story.” With Prospero’s Son, Seth Lerer acknowledges the author of his story while simultaneously reminding us that we all confront the blank page of life on our own, as authors of our lives.
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The Nearest Thing to Life
James Wood
Brandeis University Press, 2015
In this remarkable blend of memoir and criticism, James Wood, the noted contributor to the New Yorker, has written a master class on the connections between fiction and life. He argues that of all the arts, fiction has a unique ability to describe the shape of our lives and to rescue the texture of those lives from death and historical oblivion. The act of reading is understood here as the most sacred and personal of activities, and there are brilliant discussions of individual works—among others, Chekhov’s story “The Kiss,” The Emigrants, by W. G. Sebald, and The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald. Wood reveals his own intimate relationship with the written word: we see the development of a boy from the provinces growing up in a charged Christian environment, the secret joy of his childhood reading, the links he draws between reading and blasphemy, or between literature and music. The final section discusses fiction in the context of exile and homelessness. More than a tightly argued little book by a man commonly regarded as our finest living critic, The Nearest Thing to Life is an exhilarating personal account that reflects on, and embodies, the fruitful conspiracy between reader and writer (and critic), and asks us to reconsider everything that is at stake when we read and write fiction.
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SCHOLAR ADVENTURERS
RICHARD ALTICK
The Ohio State University Press, 1987
"A carefully detailed but by no means dull account of the more dignified pursuit of detection as practiced by literary scholars." --Kirkus Reviews "Although [Altick' sensibly mentions that research may be a misadventure, he naturally enough plays up its glamour and romance; and its fascination for the scholar is transmitted to the reader. His book, then, as popular reading is first-rate, solid, rewarding, and lively" --The Nation "a brisk, well-written book" --Time "This is a volume of gracefully written essays celebrating the feats of literary detective work performed by scores of learned men and women passionately in love with the minutiae of literary scholarships." --The New York Times "a more fascinating recital than any fictional mystery story, and its detectives are, it leads us to believe, more interesting in themselves--they are not mousy researchers--than fictional private eyes" --The Boston Globe Richard Altick's classic portrayal of scholars on the prowl has delighted generations of readers. From the exposure of British rare book dealer Thomas Wise--the most famous authority of his day--as a master forger of first editions to the discovery of thousands of new James Boswell papers, Altick shows the scholar at work. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and many others surrender previously unrevealed secrets to these dogged researchers, whose ceaseless sleuthing has increased our knowledge and appreciation of both literature and the people who created it. Richard D. Altick is Regent's Professor Emeritus of English at The Ohio State University. He is the author of The English Common Reader, Lives and Letters, To Be in England, Victorian Studies in Scarlet, Victorian People and Ideas, The Shows of London, Paintings from Books, and Deadly Encounters as well as numerous essays on English literature and culture.
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Forming the Critical Mind
Dryden to Coleridge
James Engell
Harvard University Press, 1989

James Engell has prepared the first broad treatment of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century British criticism to appear in a generation, presenting the views of scores of writers on a variety of questions, many of which remain live issues today.

While offering major reevaluations of Dryden, Hume, and Johnson, Engell demonstrates that eighteenth-century criticism cannot be represented by just a few major critics or by generalizations about Augustan taste, neoclassical rules, or “common sense.” He presents a complex and highly varied body of theoretical writing and practical application by dozens of critics including Rymer, Addison, Welsted, Ramsay, Hurd, Gerard, Newbery, Campbell, Blair, Beattie, Jeffrey, and Hazlitt. He also analyzes the continued relevance of their critical work, drawing connections with modern writers such as Eliot, Frye, Saussure, Barthes, Culler, Bakhtin, and Lévi-Strauss.

Engell concludes with a stimulating essay on the nature and function of the critical process itself. For students and scholars conversant with modern critical theory, Forming the Critical Mind will offer some surprising and interesting comparisons.

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A History of English Literature
Alastair Fowler
Harvard University Press, 1987
This delightful introduction to English literature, engaging, readable, and wise, is enlivened by the opinions and pleasures of a fine scholar-critic. Historically, it ranges from the Middle Ages to the present, concentrating on British writing but glancing also at selected American and Commonwealth authors, and lingering over the works of key figures such as Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Dickens.
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The Burden of the Past and the English Poet
Walter Jackson Bate
Harvard University Press, 1970

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A Choice of Inheritance
Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost
David Bromwich
Harvard University Press, 1989

For the last two centuries, literature has tested the authority of the individual and the community. During this time, in David Bromwich’s words, “A motive for great writing…has been a tension, which is felt to be unresolvable, between the claims of social obligation and of personal autonomy. That these had to be experienced as rival claims was the discovery of Burke and Wordsworth. Our lives today and our choices are made in a culture where any settlement of the contest for either side is bound to be provisional. There is nothing to approve or regret in such a situation; it is the way things are; and in a time like ours, it is what great writing lives on.”

With a historical as well as an interpretative emphasis, Bromwich explores this tension. He shows why the public-mindedness of the eighteenth century is as limited a model for readers now as the individualism of the nineteenth century. Calling attention to the ambivalence of the great writers, he cites Emerson’s sense of the conflict between “spirit” and “commodity” and Burke’s conviction that human nature is at once given and chosen. Elsewhere, he describes the attenuation of social concern even in the truest modern followers of the romantics as in the conscious turn away from Wordsworth’s morality in poems by Stevens and Frost. Other topics include Keats’s politics, Whitman’s prose, William Cobbett’s journalism, and the standards of the Edinburgh Review.

In some widely discussed general essays, Bromwich addresses such issues as the uses of biography, the idea that authors create their own worlds, and the political ambitions of recent literary theory. His own criticism is powerfully eclectic, combining history, philosophy, biography, and a subtle awareness of how literature performs its work of implication. He brings to the task an authentic understanding of intellectual culture and the ability to leap from textual detail to cultural observation with an understated grace.

As in his other writing, Bromwich aims to join aesthetic theory and moral thought. He rethinks the relationship between genius and talent, and defines genius in terms of its capacity to bring about change, rather than simply its quality of inward and spiritual uniqueness. His sustained defense here of that conception, and his elegant argument for a new approach to criticism generally, make this thoughtful book a controversial one as well.

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The Scholar's Art
Literary Studies in a Managed World
Jerome McGann
University of Chicago Press, 2006
For Jerome McGann, the purpose of scholarship is to preserve and pass on cultural heritage, a feat accomplished through discussion among scholars and interested nonspecialists. In The Scholar’s Art, a collection of thirteen essays, McGann both addresses and exemplifies that discussion and the vocation it supports. 

Of particular interest to McGann is the demise of public discourse about poetry.  That poetry has become recondite is, to his mind, at once a problem for how scholars do their work and a general cultural emergency. The Scholar’s Art asks what could be gained by reimagining the way scholars have codified the literary and cultural history of the past two hundred years and goes on to provide a series of case studies that illustrate how scholarly method can help bring about such reimaginings.  McGann closes with a discussion of technology’s ability to harness the reimagination of cultural memory and concludes with exemplary acts of critical reflection. 

Astute observation from one of America’s most bracing and original commentators on the place of literature in twenty-first century culture, The Scholar’s Art proposes new ways—cultural, philological, and technological—to reimagine our literary past and future.
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Miscellaneous Verdicts
Writings on Writers
Anthony Powell
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Miscellaneous Verdicts represents the best of Anthony Powell's critical writing over a period of four decades. Drawn from his regular reviews for the Daily Telegraph, from his occasional humorous pieces for Punch, and from his more sustained pieces of critical and anecdotal writing on writers, this collection is as witty, fresh, surprising, and entertaining as one would expect from the author of Dance to the Music of Time.

Powell begins with a section on the British, exploring his fascination both with genealogy and with figures like John Aubrey, and writing in depth about writers like Kipling, Conrad, and Hardy. The second section, on America, also opens with discussions of family trees (in this case presidential ones) and includes pieces on Henry James, James Thurber, American booksellers in Paris, Hemingway, and Dashiell Hammett. Personal encounters, and absorbing incidents from the lives of his subjects, frequently fill these pages—as they do even more in the section on Powell's contemporaries—Connolly, Orwell, Graham Greene, and others. Finally, and aptly, the book closes with a section on Proust and matters Proustian, including a marvellous essay on what is eaten and drunk, and by whom, in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.

"An urbane book, quietly erudite, very sensible, highly civilized, remarkably useful."—Anthony Burgess, Observer

"An acute intelligence and fastidious sense of humor make [Powell] the funniest and most profound living writer of the English language."—Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, Sunday Telegraph

Anthony Powell was born in London in 1905. He is the author of seven novels, a biography of John Aubrey, two plays, a collection of memoirs, and the twelve-volume novel sequence Dance to the Music of Time.
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AfterWord
Conjuring the Literary Dead
Dale Salwak
University of Iowa Press, 2011
If you could meet one deceased literary figure, who would that be? What would you ask? What would you say, and why? In AfterWord: Conjuring the Literary Dead, eighteen distinguished authors respond to this challenge by creating imagined conversations with a constellation of British and American authors, from Samuel Johnson to Jane Austen to Samuel Beckett to Edith Wharton.
 
Each chapter embarks on an intellectual, emotional, and often humorous voyage as the layers of time are peeled away, letting readers experience authors as they really were in their own era or, on occasion, transported to the present. As eccentric as it is eclectic, this collection takes the audience on a dizzying descent into a literary Inferno where biographers, novelists, and critics eat the food of the dead and return to tell the tale. Readers will take great pleasure in seeing what happens when scholars are loosed from the chains of fact and conduct imaginary interviews with deceased authors.
 
Covering 200 years of literary history, the essays in AfterWord draw upon the lifelong, consuming interest of the contributors, each fashioning a vivid, credible portrait of a vulnerable, driven, fully human character. As contributors appeal to what Margaret Atwood calls the deep human desire to “go to the land of the dead, to bring back to the living someone who has gone there,” readers are privy to questions that have seldom been asked, to incidents that have been suppressed, to some of the secrets that have puzzled readers for years, and to novel literary truths about the essential nature of each author.
 
Contributors to AfterWord are: Catherine Aird (on Rudyard Kipling), Brian Aldiss (on Thomas Hardy), Margaret Atwood (on negotiating with the dead), William M. Chace (on Ezra Pound), Nora Crook (on the Shelleys), Paul Delany (on George Gissing), Colin Dexter (on Alfred Edward Housman), Margaret Drabble (on Arnold Bennett), Peter Firchow (on George Orwell), Alan W. Friedman (on Samuel Beckett), Eugene Goodheart (on Jane Austen), John Halperin (on Edith Wharton), Francis King (on Oscar Wilde), Jeffrey Meyers (on Samuel Johnson), Cynthia Ozick (on Henry James), Jay Parini (on Robert Frost), Carl Rollyson (on William Faulkner), Dale Salwak and Laura Nagy (on literary imagination), Alan Sillitoe (on Joseph Conrad), and Ann Thwaite (on Frances Hodgson Burnett, Edmund Gosse, A. A. Milne, and Emily Tennyson).
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