A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY178 start with S start with S
Images, whether filmic or not, cannot be replaced by words. Yet words can make images. This is the general thesis underlying So What, a collection of essays on canonical filmmakers like Luchino Visconti and Orson Welles; more experimental directors, such as Marguerite Duras and Albert Serra; and visual artists, including Hollis Frampton and Agnes Martin. Alexander García Düttmann aims to make their films as if they did not precede his text, capturing their idea and experience.
If the relationship between filmic image and text is a heterogeneous one, then this heterogeneity must leave a trace. This is why the book’s chapters are organized not according to historical periods or on the basis of film theories but rather by single concepts that function like dictionary entries. The chapters adopt different forms, blurring the lines between art and philosophy. So What is a practical exercise in “making films with words,” inviting readers to draw out insights from its conceptual play.
So What compiles previously untranslated and hard-to-find essays into a single volume, one that represents the absorbing and singular thought process of a major contemporary philosopher.
In Socrates among Strangers, Joseph P. Lawrence reclaims the enigmatic sage from those who have seen him either as a prophet of science, seeking the security of knowledge, or as a wily actor who shed light on the dangerous world of politics while maintaining a prudent distance from it. The Socrates Lawrence seeks is the imprudent one, the man who knew how to die.
The institutionalization of philosophy in the modern world has come at the cost of its most vital concern: the achievement of life wisdom. Those who have ceased to grow (those who think they know) close their ears to the wisdom of strangers—and Socrates, who stood face to face with death, is the archetypal stranger. His avowal of ignorance, Lawrence suggests, is more needed than ever in an age defined by technical mastery and expert knowledge.
Grounded in ecofeminist theory, this literary analysis examines Walker’s evolving views on animals in relation to her discussions of other oppressed groups. Pamela B. June argues that Walker’s fiction can help readers understand and perhaps challenge American culture’s mistreatment of nonhuman animals. Walker has withstood criticism for her decision to abandon vegetarianism, and this book also problematizes the slippery territory of viewing writers as moral guides. Solidarity with the Other Beings on the Planet will appeal to readers in literary studies, ecofeminist studies, African American studies, and critical animal studies.
Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone sees Renisha McBride, Sandra Bland, Korrynn Gaines, and others not as ornamental nor does the book attempt to canonize the dead women as saints. The poems see them as they are: play-cousins, home-girls, the mirror. Line to line, there is an obsession with keeping all of the women in the poems safe and perhaps resurrectable. The black girl who is alive here lives to switch her waistline to a reggae beat. She is in the middle of the dance floor with a suicide note in her purse as a means of warding off bad juju. Always, she is chasing joy head-on, at warp speed.
Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone is a celebration that the black girl will always dance, in the church basement, a grandmother’s funeral repast—she dances until she hits the floor, in her joy . . . and her grief.
Finalist, 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
Winner, 2012 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play
Winner, 2012 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play
A deeply humorous, unflinching portrait of grief and loss, Sons of the Prophet depicts a Lebanese-American family in rural Pennsylvania beset by an absurd string of tragedies. At the play’s center is Joseph Douaihy, a once-promising world-class runner now sidelined by injury. As Joseph confronts his deteriorating health, he is also forced to face the death of his father, an ailing Uncle, and a desperate boss beset by her own tragedies. Deftly keeping its various storylines in careful balance, Karam’s play confronts, with abundant intelligence and great sympathy for human frailty, the inevitability of loss and the equally inevitable comedy resulting from our attempts to cope with is consequences.
Freely parodying conformist Russian writing, this novel takes its lead as much from Sterne and Diderot as from the brilliant Russian satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko. In the offhand witticisms and jaunty humor speaks the spirit that survived the "era of stagnation" of Soviet literature.
Schieber's drawings, paintings, poetry, and prose are all intimate reflections of one another. Her experience forged the unusual sense of time that shapes Schieber's stories. In her preface, Phyllis Lassner writes: "The timetable of Ava's stories often consists of circles within circles, of patterns of an intertwined past, the past present of hiding, and the present looking back at those distinctly separate but inseparable pasts."
As Mary Ann Cain's South Side Venus: The Legacy of Margaret Burroughs reveals, the primary motivations for these efforts were love and hope. Burroughs was spurred by her love for Chicago's African American community—largely ill served by mainstream arts organizations—and by her hope that these new, black-run cultural centers would welcome many generations of aspiring artists and art lovers.
This first, long–awaited biography of Burroughs draws on interviews with peers, colleagues, friends, and family, and extensive archival research at the DuSable Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Chicago Public Library. Cain traces Burroughs's multifaceted career, details her work and residency on Chicago's South Side, and highlights her relationships with other artists and culture makers. Here, we see Burroughs as teacher and mentor as well as institution builder.
Anchored by the author's talks with Burroughs as they stroll through her beloved Bronzeville, and featuring portraits of Burroughs with family and friends, South Side Venus will enlighten anyone interested in Chicago, African American history, social justice, and the arts.
Inspired by Bey’s 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial exhibition, Southern Exposure visits sixty sites, including lesser-known but important work by luminaries such as Jeanne Gang, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Eero Saarinen, as well as buildings by pioneering black architects such as Walter T. Bailey, John Moutoussamy, and Roger Margerum.
Pushing against the popular narrative that depicts Chicago’s South Side as an architectural wasteland, Bey shows beautiful and intact buildings and neighborhoods that reflect the value—and potential—of the area. Southern Exposure offers much to delight architecture aficionados and writers, native Chicagoans and guests to the city alike.
“As a history, the book is a remarkable tour de force. Using mainly linguistic evidence, the author locates populations, moves them around, determines their relative influence vis-à-vis their neighbors, and reconstructs aspects of their culture, from basic economy to the practice of extracting incisors.” —American Anthropologist
But anti-Semites, under the protection of the Nazi regime, began to settle old scores, and targeted the economically successful rural Jews. New laws stripped Jewish meat dealers of their rights, and Aryan competitors eagerly forced them aside. That was only the beginning. In the Holocaust that followed, some members of the family escaped. Others did not.
Sovereignty unfolds over two parallel timelines. In present-day Oklahoma, a young Cherokee lawyer, Sarah Ridge Polson, and her colleague Jim Ross defend the inherent jurisdiction of Cherokee Nation in the U.S. Supreme Court when a non-Indian defendant challenges the Nation’s authority to prosecute non-Indian perpetrators of domestic violence. Their collaboration is juxtaposed with scenes from 1835, when Cherokee Nation was eight hundred miles to the east in the southern Appalachians. That year, Sarah’s and Jim’s ancestors, historic Cherokee rivals, were bitterly divided over a proposed treaty with the administration of Andrew Jackson, the Treaty of New Echota, which led to the nation’s removal to Oklahoma on the infamous Trail of Tears.
A direct descendant of nineteenth-century Cherokee leaders John Ridge and Major Ridge, Mary Kathryn Nagle has penned a play that twists and turns from violent outbursts to healing monologues, illuminating a provocative double meaning for the sovereignty of both tribal territory and women’s bodies. Taking as its point of departure the story of one lawyer’s passionate defense of the rights of her people to prosecute non-natives who commit crimes on reservations, Sovereignty opens up into an expansive exploration of the circular continuity of history, human memory, and the power of human relationships.
Winner, University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies
The Soviet Writers’ Union offered writers elite status and material luxuries in exchange for literature that championed the state. This book argues that Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin chose leaders for this crucial organization, such as Maxim Gorky and Alexander Fadeyev, who had psychological traits he could exploit. Stalin ensured their loyalty with various rewards but also with a philosophical argument calculated to assuage moral qualms, allowing them to feel they were not trading ethics for self‑interest.
Employing close textual analysis of public and private documents including speeches, debate transcripts, personal letters, and diaries, Carol Any exposes the misgivings of Writers’ Union leaders as well as the arguments they constructed when faced with a cognitive dissonance. She tells a dramatic story that reveals the interdependence of literary policy, communist morality, state‑sponsored terror, party infighting, and personal psychology. This book will be an important reference for scholars of the Soviet Union as well as anyone interested in identity, the construction of culture, and the interface between art and ideology.
This guide focuses on the technical elements of voice and speech, including breathing, resonance, and diction, as well as providing an introduction to verse speaking and scansion and to Shakespeare’s rhetorical devices, such as antithesis, alliteration, onomatopoeia, irony, metaphor, and wordplay. These topics are annotated with examples from Shakespeare’s plays to demonstrate how an actor can apply the lessons to actual performance. The book also explores the history of Shakespearean performance in the United States and provides guidance on current editions of Shakespeare’s text from the Folio to online Open Source Shakespeare. A helpful appendix offers examples of two-person scenes and contextualized monologues.
In a confrontation with today’s fatalistic milieu, principal emphasis is given to Hegel’s idea of infinity as the intrinsic dimension of negativity within all finitude. Against the modern era’s paradigmatic tendency to externalize social problems in the form of antagonism and Otherness, Daly argues for a renewal of utopian thought based on Hegelian reconciliation and the affirmation of excess as the essence of all being. On these grounds, he advances a new kind of political imagination that in speculative terms centers on uncompromising notions of truth and reason.
Through a combination of philosophical reflection and close rhetorical readings, Eyers explores the possibilities and limits of deconstructive approaches to the literary, the impact of the “digital humanities” on theory, and the prospects for a formalist approach to “world literature.” The book includes sustained close readings of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Yeats, and Wallace Stevens, as well as Alain Badiou, Paul de Man, and Fredric Jameson.
A multigenerational epic, Spiral of Silence (Espiral de Silencios) opens in the early 1980s, as peace and amnesty agreements spark optimism and hope. We meet Norma, a privileged, upper-class woman who is married to an army general; Maria Teresa (Mariate), a young rebel who loves a guerrilla fighter and navigates commitments to motherhood and revolutionary activism; and Amparo, a woman who comes of age later, and carries the confusion and dislocation of a younger generation. Each contends with the consequences of war and violence on her life; each is empowered through community-building and working for change.
Few authors have considered the role of women in Colombia during this wartime period, and Sánchez-Blake's nuanced exploration of gender and sexism—framed by conflict and social upheaval—distinguishes the novel. Drawing on stories from women who have worked within organizations in Colombia to end state violence, Spiral of Silence celebrates resistance, reinvention, and how women create and protect their families and communities.
The Spirit Level is the first collection by an exciting new voice in American poetry. Representing the world as a place of feverish energies, David Barber creates a virtuoso tension between playful, sometimes flamboyant, diction, and the seriousness of his concerns. Balance and grace, but also wit and verbal energy, and a deft hand at shaping the poem, make Barber's first book a superb debut.
Richly detailed, nuanced, and theoretically wide-ranging, Staging Lives in Latin American Theater reveals a range of interpretations about how documentary theater can conceptualize the idea of self while also proclaiming a new mode of testimony through theatrical practices.
Rachel Anderson-Rabern explores the ideas of boredom and quotidian employment that permeate particular performance projects. Using Henri Lefebvre’s concepts of work roles within everyday philosophy, she demonstrates that collective creation gives rise to new economies of performance. The book also presents theories of the political stakes of danced gestural forms in performance, informed by Giorgio Agamben’s writings on gesture, and elaborates the ways in which these ensembles make use of durational performance to posit ethical frameworks: ways of living in the world.
Conversing with the ideas of Paul Virilio and Guy Debord among others, Anderson- Rabern claims that these groups posit new models of aesthetic politics through careful, speed-based investigations of construction and destruction that unearth the powerful potential of contemporary collaborative methods to be at once aesthetically minded, ethically driven, and politically engaged.
The Stars, the Earth, the River contains an excellent introduction by the translators, grounding the stories in Le Minh Khue's personal history. You simultaneously feel the rage of the author and the narrator when Khue disparagingly notes that the conversations around her center on luxuries, motor scooters, and business deals. Of what use, these stories ask, is such suffering? How can a culture honor the losses of war?
Winner, 2012 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America
Winner, Individual Artist's Award from the Maryland State Arts Council
First Prize, Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Award for Poems on the Jewish Experience (for three poems from her manuscript-in-progress, "The Arranged Marriage")
Although the poems in Stateside are concerned with a husband's deployment to the war in Iraq, Jehanne Dubrow's riveting collection is driven more by intellectual curiosity and emotional exploration than by any overt political agenda. The speaker in these poems attempts to understand her situation within the long history of military wives left to wait and wonder – Penelope is a model, but also a source of mystery. These poems are dazzling in their use of form, their sensual imagery, and their learnedness, and possess a level of subtlety and control rarely found in the work of a young poet. Dubrow is fearless in her contemplation of the far-reaching effects of war, but even more so in her excavation of a marriage under duress.
A Stein Reader includes unpublished work, such as the portrait "Article"; shows the astonishing stylistic change in the neglected "A Long Gay Book"; draws attention to the many unknown plays such as "Reread Another;" and offers fascinating portraits of Matisse, Picasso, and Sitwell. Illuminating headnotes bring out connections between pieces and provide invaluable keys to Stein's motifs and thought patterns.
Adept at capturing the experience of the upper-middle-class African-American, Diamond lays out two families' worth of secrets in this precise play. With only six characters, she constructs a vivid weekend of crossed pasts and uncertain but optimistic futures. On Martha's Vineyard, an affluent African-American family gathers in their vacation home, joined by the housekeeper's daughter, who is filling in for her mother. The family patriarch is a philandering physician; one of his sons has followed in his footsteps, while the other, after numerous false starts in a variety of careers, is a struggling novelist. Both bring along their current girlfriends, to meet the family for the first time. With such highly--perhaps over--educated vacationers, the conversation and the barbs fly, on subjects ranging from race to economics to politics. But there is also more than enough human drama, which reaches its climax when an old family secret comes out. Through lively exchanges and simmering wit, the family tackles a history filled with complications both within the family and in the outer world.
A New York Times Notable Book for 1999
Best Fiction of 1999, the Los Angeles Times Book Review
Starred review, Publishers Weekly
Finalist for 1998 Dublin IMPAC Literary Award
The narrator of this book is an Irish-American woman who returns to the West African country of Niger where she had lived seventeen years earlier as the wife of an academic and the mother of three young daughters. Now she is visiting her eldest daughter, Zara, who has herself returned to Africa during a season of devastating drought and is working in a village clinic that cares for women and children suffering from starvation.
Still Waters in Niger is a beautifully observed account of a return to a place at once exotic and familiar, as well as a tale of inner discovery. As the narrator reacquaints herself with her daughter and with the Africa of her past, she meets other mothers and their children. With her own memories of young motherhood strong, she becomes aware of the strikingly similar ways in which the impassioned and often difficult bonds between mothers and daughters are revealed across the divide of cultures. Hill paints a compelling portrait of a community of women grounded in kinship and care for their children, a society characterized not only by pain and exhaustion but by humor, delicacy, and strength. Filled with vivid, elegant descriptions and meditations on hunger, poverty, the desert, women, memory, and the love between mothers and daughters, Still Waters in Niger is the haunting story of a woman looking simultaneously backward and forward.
Working on a large canvas that encompasses the extremes of rural Africa and urban London, material poverty and the surfeit of privilege, Sacks writes stories peopled by characters whose lives occasionally crisscross, with a protagonist in one story playing a deceptively small role in another. The stories artfully illuminate the rich interconnections and clashes that occur as her characters strike out boldly, yet find themselves at the mercy of capricious waves of circumstance.
Stone Baby explores movement, loss, and reinvention in the lives of people who are in the wrong place, in the wrong body, perhaps in the wrong life—it encapsulates an engrossing and urgent message in our age of migration and dislocation.
Thoroughly versed in Russian and European modernism, in Bely's biography and writings, and in twentieth-century literary theory, Langen constructs an original analytic scheme for reading Petersburg. Guided by Bely's fertile but challenging notions of art and philosophy, he analyzes the novel first as an object embodying intentions and essences, then as a pattern of signification and events, and finally as a dance of gestures that coordinate body and meaning, regularity and surprise, self and other, and author, novel, and reader. The terms are derived from Bely's own writings, but they are nuanced with reference to Russian and European contexts and clarified with reference to philosophy and literary theory. Langen shows how Bely invariably challenges his own concepts and patterns, thereby creating an unusually demanding and dynamic text. In finding an approach to these enriching difficulties, this book at long last shows readers a welcoming way into Bely's thought, and his masterwork, and their place in the complex world of early twentieth-century literature.
Author Steven J. Harper pays tribute to a well-respected teacher with this biography of a distinguished William Smith Mason Professor of History at Northwestern University, Richard W. Leopold. Harper had maintained contact with his former professor, as had hundreds of other alumni, meeting with him in the apartment to which his age and health confined him. When Leopold invited him to review his biographical materials to prepare a New York Times obituary, Harper began to catch glimpses of a deeper history in Leopold’s life: that of Jews in America after the turn of the century.
Across two years of Sundays, Leopold’s life came together and Harper began to notice parallels between the life of his professor and the life of his recently deceased father-in-law. Both grew up in less orthodox households but were still identified as Jewish by others; both attended Ivy League colleges, fighting (and beating) anti-Semitism there; and both served their country with distinction in World War II. The two men persevered through a twentieth century Jewish-American experience that they and many others shared, but rarely discussed. Steven Harper has caught them both on the page just in time to document their lives, their culture, and the nation that grew and changed alongside them.
The Balkans have been so troubled by violence and misunderstanding that we have the verb “balkanize,” meaning to break up into smaller, warring components. While some of the region’s artists and thinkers have invariably fallen into nationalistic tendencies, the twenty-two prominent authors represented here, from the erstwhile Yugoslavia and its neighbors Albania and Bulgaria, have chosen to attempt to bridge these divides. The essays, biographical sketches, and stories in The Stranger Next Door form a project of understanding that picks up where politics fail. The English-language translation joins editions of the book that appeared concurrently in all of the participating countries.
Stone's moving debut collection of verse is inspired by her encounter with perhaps the last cohesive, traditional Jewish community in the Middle East and North Africa. According to their story of origin, a handful of exiles arrived on the island of Djerba, Tunisia, in 586 B.C., carrying a single stone from the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem. Drawing from this cosmology, the poems follow a stranger who arrives into an ancient community that is both at home and deeply estranged on the island. Its people occupy the uneasy space of all insular communities, deciding when to let the world in and when to shut it out. The poems are about the daily lives and deeper cosmos of the Jews of Djerba as well as the Muslims next door. In her exploration, Stone sees vivid recurring images of keys, stones, homes, the laughter of girls, the eyes of men, the color blue, and the force of blood or bombs. With this journey of faith, doubt, longing, and home, Stone has brought readers a rare look into a story that resonates powerfully with questions of cultural preservation and coexistence.
In the course of this analysis, Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado engages with theories of world literature, proposing that “world literature” is a construction produced at various levels, including the national, that must be studied from its material conditions of production in specific sites. In particular, he argues that Mexican writers have engaged in a “strategic Occidentalism” in which their idiosyncratic connections with world literature have responded to dynamics different from those identified by world-systems or diffusionist theorists.
Strategic Occidentalism identifies three scenes in which a cosmopolitan aesthetics in Mexican world literature has been produced: Sergio Pitol’s translation of Eastern European and marginal British modernist literature; the emergence of the Crack group as a polemic against the legacies of magical realism; and the challenges of writers like Carmen Boullosa, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Ana García Bergua to the roles traditionally assigned to Latin American writers in world literature.
This study develops a novel account of representational cognition, explaining how cognitive systems progressively come to map the structure of their worlds. Daniel Sacilotto offers a constructive response to the critique of representation formulated throughout the post‑Kantian philosophical tradition. Rather than a skepticism or idealism whereby thinking can grasp appearances but never the real, representation, Sacilotto shows, is a constitutive dimension of cognitive systems’ creative capacity to know and intervene in the world of which they are part.
Structure and Thought: Toward a Materialist Theory of Representational Cognition integrates various lines in contemporary philosophy, including those often seen as incommensurable or in irresolvable tension with one another. Sacilotto thus advances a productive synthesis of a materialist ambition to provide a creative and historical understanding of cognition with a structural realist account of representation. He shows how the different forms of sensory, discursive, and theoretical mediation that characterize human cognition are conducive to a realist epistemological framework that explains how the possibility of knowledge about a mind‑independent reality is conceivable.
As in his 1998 New York Times Notable Book The Engrafted Word, the city of Rome becomes a lens through which to understand the contemporary human experience and the upheavals of human loss. Stumbling Blocks takes as its starting point the shattered ancient Roman ruins described in Renaissance poet Joachim du Bellay's celebrated sonnet—a landscape of death feeding upon itself and restored to life in the imagination of each successive generation to salvage its own narratives.
Kirchwey builds new arches and mythological intersections in exquisite poems that take long walks in the Eternal City, through landscapes far away and deep within. This gorgeous collection takes us back in time and brings us forward through our Old and New Worlds, revealing through the religion of art both beauty and atrocity.
Nothing less than a rethinking of the conditions of Western art as it relates to politics, architecture, and time, this study of Walter Benjamin's modernity in temporal and spatial terms is a provocative and original work of philosophy in its own right—a work that suggests that the time has come to revise existing paradigms.
Responding to the ongoing “objectal turn” in contemporary humanities and social sciences, the essays in Subject Lessons present a sustained case for the continued importance— indeed, the indispensability—of the category of the subject for the future of materialist thought.
Approaching matters through the frame of Hegel and Lacan, the contributors to this volume, including the editors, as well as Andrew Cole, Mladen Dolar, Nathan Gorelick, Adrian Johnston, Todd McGowan, Borna Radnik, Molly Anne Rothenberg, Kathryn Van Wert, and Alenka Zupančič—many of whom stand at the forefront of contemporary Hegel and Lacan scholarship—agree with neovitalist thinkers that material reality is ontologically incomplete, in a state of perpetual becoming, yet they maintain that this is the case not in spite of but, rather, because of the subject.
Incorporating elements of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary and cultural studies, Subject Lessons contests the movement to dismiss the subject, arguing that there can be no truly robust materialism without accounting for the little piece of the Real that is the subject.
Because "the other," or the object, is constructed, Rupprecht finds in narcissism the possibility of rewriting notions of identity. She then pursues this possibility through modern literary texts in which narcissism acts as a structuring principle—works by the expressionist poet Henriette Hardenberg, the American avant-garde novelist Djuna Barnes, and the surrealist writer Unica Zürn—reading each within the critical framework of the evolution of the idea of narcissism in psychoanalytic theory. All written by women, these works also raise questions of gender and sexuality. Moreover, because each of these authors belonged to or was influenced by a particular literary movement, Rupprecht's analysis advances our understanding of the poetics of these movements and of the movement of modernism itself. Underlying all is a deep engagement with psychoanalytic theory. Drawing on Freud, his contemporaries and rivals, Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and many other theorists, Rupprecht interrogates preconceived notions of identity and subjectivity through her readings of the "transgressive potential" of narcissism as it is enacted in the texts under study. Bringing the works of literary modernism and psychoanalysis together in an innovative and provocative way, her book succeeds in enhancing our sense of both, and in clarifying the complex role of narcissism in our cultural narrative.
The key point Luft brings into focus is that Husserl's hermeneutic phenomenology is distinct from other hermeneutic philosophers', namely Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Unlike them, Husserl's focus centers on the work subjects must do in order to uncover the prejudices that guide their unreflective relationship to the world. Luft also demonstrates that there is a deep consistency within Husserl's own writings—from early to late—around the guiding themes of the natural attitude, the need and function of the epoché, and the split between egos, where the transcendental self (distinct from the natural self) is seen as the fundamental ability we all have to inquire into the genesis of our tradition-laden attitudes toward the world.
Contemporary scholars have critiqued the modern rights paradigm for its failure to acknowledge the ways in which individual rights depend upon state protection and national belonging. Through a reappraisal of early modern French tragedy, Rosensweig provides a corrective to accounts of human rights that begin with the French Revolution, exploring previously unrecognized models for collective action that had emerged during the religious wars. Subjects of Affection reveals how French tragedy sustained these models of collective action by binding together individuals and groups through affect. Rosensweig places sixteenth-century political treatises in dialogue with dramas by Robert Garnier, Jean Rotrou, Pierre Corneille, and Jean Racine that were performed and published between 1550 and 1700. In so doing, she demonstrates how these tragedies, through their poetics and performance potential, stage a subject of rights whose collective constitution differs from the individualism of our modern rights framework. Through fresh insights and incisive readings, Subjects of Affection explores a form of political subjectivity that locates political power in connection to others—from staged characters and choruses to unseen collectives.
In his youth, Vladimir Nabokov aspired to become a landscape artist. Even though he eventually realized that his true vocation was literature, his keen sense of visual detail, nuanced perception of color, and vast knowledge of the fine arts are all manifest in his literary works, which abound with painters and paintings, real and imaginary, as well as with magnificent pictorial imagery rendered in a verbal medium. The relation of the visual arts to Nabokov’s work is the subject of The Sublime Artist’s Studio, an in-depth and detailed study of one of the most significant facets of this modern master’s oeuvre.
Gavriel Shapiro pursues his inquiry throughout Nabokov’s literary legacy—poetry, short prose, novels, plays, memoirs, lectures, essays, interviews, and letters. What is the import of Nabokov’s lifelong fascination with the Old Masters? How does landscape function in Nabokov’s writings? What was the author’s relationship to contemporary artists? By addressing these and other questions, while examining Nabokov’s references and allusions to the visual arts and to particular works and artists, Shapiro is able to reveal the centrality of painting to Nabokov’s belles lettres. His book offers a new and promising approach to one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated writers.
The Sublime South: Andalusia, Orientalism, and the Making of Modern Spain is the first systematic study on cultural images of Andalusia as Spain’s “Orient” and the impact they have had on nation-building and modernization since the late nineteenth century. While a wealth of studies have examined how northern Europeans from the Romantic period viewed Spain and Andalusia as Europe’s Orient, little attention has been paid to how contemporary Spanish artists and intellectuals assimilated Romantic legacies to engage in an internal form of orientalism.
José Luis Venegas deftly explores Spain’s shifting engagements with oriental identity and otherness by looking, not just beyond national, ethnic, and racial borders, but at a territory that is institutionally embedded in the nation-state while symbolically placed between inclusion and abjection. The Sublime South shifts the focus and scale of Edward Said’s notion of orientalism by examining how it evolves and manifests transnationally, as the result of European colonialism in Africa and Asia, and intra-nationally, in a European yet orientalized country. Finally, Venegas challenges ethnocentric notions of Iberian cultures and fosters an understanding of the encounters between Western and Muslim cultures beyond opposing, and often mutually negating, essentialisms.
While known primarily as a cultural critic and novelist, Sontag was also a filmmaker, stage director, and dramatist. It was her status as a pop icon that was unusual for an American intellectual: she was filmed by Andy Warhol and Woody Allen, photographed by Annie Leibovitz and Diane Arbus, and her likeness adorned advertisements for Absolut vodka. Drawing on newly available sources, including interviews with Nadine Gordimer, Robert Wilson, and Sontag’s son, David Rieff, as well as on myriad interviews given by Sontag and her extensive correspondence with her friend and publisher Roger Straus, Schreiber explores the roles that Sontag played in influencing American public cultural and political conversations.
Classical deities and down-and-out junkies, high school sweethearts and the inner life of JFK—these are the coordinates of J.T. Barbarese’s terrain. The poems in Sweet Spot set up shop where average lived experience meets American history. Masterfully evokes both the specific land- and cityscapes of his poems as well the psychological types of the varied characters that populate them, Sweet Spot confirms Barbarese’s preeminence as a chronicler of the heroic everyday, the telling detail, the subtle reminders of the human predicament hidden in habit and memory.
Based on several tours and individual stagings, Sweet Tea: A Play invites readers, students, theater practitioners, and audiences from different backgrounds to engage with the lives of eleven men and one gender-nonconforming person—incredible characters all originally played by the author in a one-man show.
This ranging epistolary novel follows Julia Grenville, a Welsh beauty who knows little of the world until her marriage to the older Lord Stanley. Through Julia’s letters to her sister, readers learn more of Julia’s new life in London—her unfaithful husband, her miscarriage, her disillusionment with the city and its fashions. Other letters reveal that Julia has a longtime admirer, Harry Woodley, from her former life, as well as a mysterious guardian angel: her Sylph. This character guides Julia away from the depravities of her life in London, including her gambling problem. The Sylph is also another sympathetic ear to Julia’s increasing marital dissatisfaction and growing affinity for another man, the Baron Ton-hausen. As Julia nearly falls prey to the overzealous admirations of one of her husband’s associates, her husband is consumed by gambling debts to that same associate. She is shocked to discover the depths of her husband’s ruin and plans to flee to Wales before she too can be claimed in payment. Her disgraced husband takes the ultimate way out and Julia goes home to her father and sister in Wales. Her Sylph is not far behind, however, and soon reveals himself to Julia to be more than she could have ever imagined.
A vital breath of life arrives in American poetry with Synthetic Jungle, the latest collection from acclaimed poet Michael Chang. With poems in a register both hilarious and scathing, Synthetic Jungle effortlessly bashes convention while simultaneously rebuilding the language we use to communicate our fears and joys.
Synthetic Jungle is a collection written by a brilliant jester who winks at you as you catch their every reference before sharing a laugh at your own self-satisfaction. Themes of identity, sexuality, and literacy play out in a dizzying rhythm of microtheaters. Readers will find themselves giggling, snorting, and guffawing their way through this work: whether at a repudiation of the literary landscape or a critique of a failing justice system, to laugh along with Chang is to recognize your mistakes and, ultimately, grow from them.
Fractal and kinetic in the quick-witted spirit of John Ashbery and Emily Dickinson, Chang’s tender poems dance around, between, and through the personal and philosophical. Synthetic Jungle is as sweet as it is grand, and beneath its sarcastic grin reverberates an immense, open heart.
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