A new reading of Virginia Woolf in the context of “long modernism.”

In recent decades, Virginia Woolf’s contribution to literary history has been located primarily within a female tradition. Elizabeth Abel dislodges Woolf from her iconic place within this tradition to uncover her shadowy presence in other literary genealogies. Abel elicits unexpected echoes of Woolf in four major writers from diverse cultural contexts: Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, and W. G. Sebald. By mapping the wayward paths of what Woolf called “odd affinities” that traverse the boundaries of gender, race, and nationality, Abel offers a new account of the arc of Woolf’s career and the transnational modernist genealogy constituted by her elusive and shifting presence. Odd Affinities will appeal to students and scholars working in New Modernist studies, comparative literature, gender and sexuality studies, and African American studies.

Helen Vendler widens her exploration of lyric poetry with a new assessment of the six great odes of John Keats and in the process gives us, implicitly, a reading of Keats’s whole career. She proposes that these poems, usually read separately, are imperfectly seen unless seen together—that they form a sequence in which Keats pursued a strict and profound inquiry into questions of language, philosophy, and aesthetics.

Vendler describes a Keats far more intellectually intent on creating an aesthetic, and on investigating poetic means, than we have yet seen, a Keats inquiring into the proper objects of worship for man, the process of soul making, the female Muse, the function of aesthetic reverie, and the ontological nature of the work of art. We see him questioning the admissibility of ancient mythology in a post Enlightenment art, the hierarchy of the arts, the role of the passions in art, and the rival claims of abstraction and representation. In formal terms, he investigates in the odes the appropriateness of various lyric structures. And in debating the value to poetry of the languages of personification, mythology, philosophical discourse, and trompe l’oeil description, Keats more and more clearly distinguishes the social role of lyric from those of painting, philosophy, or myth.

Like Vendler’s previous work on Yeats, Stevens, and Herbert, this finely conceived volume suggests that lyric poetry is best understood when many forms of inquiry—thematic, linguistic, historical, psychological, and structural—are brought to bear on it at once.

Doris Salcedo, a Colombian-born artist, addresses the politics of memory and forgetting in work that embraces fraught situations in dangerous places. Noted critic and theorist Mieke Bal narrates between the disciplines of contemporary culture in order to boldly reimagine the role of the visual arts. Both women are pathbreaking figures, globally renowned and widely respected. Doris Salcedo, meet Mieke Bal.

In Of What One Cannot Speak, Bal leads us into intimate encounters with Salcedo’s art, encouraging us to consider each work as a “theoretical object” that invites—and demands—certain kinds of considerations about history, death, erasure, and grief. Bal ranges widely through Salcedo’s work, from Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios series—in which the artist uses worn shoes to retrace los desaparecidos (“the disappeared”) from nations like Argentina, Chile, and Colombia—to Shibboleth, Salcedo’s once-in-a-lifetime commission by the Tate Modern, for which she created a rupture, as if by earthquake, that stretched the length of the museum hall’s concrete floor. In each instance, Salcedo’s installations speak for themselves, utilizing household items, human bones, and common domestic architecture to explore the silent spaces between violence, trauma, and identity. Yet Bal draws out even deeper responses to the work, questioning the nature of political art altogether and introducing concepts of metaphor, time, and space in order to contend with Salcedo’s powerful sculptures and installations.

An unforgettable fusion of art and essay, Of What One Cannot Speak takes us to the very core of events we are capable of remembering—yet still uncomfortably cannot speak aloud.

In Old Town Road, Chris Molanphy considers Lil Nas X’s debut single as pop artifact, chart phenomenon, and cultural watershed. “Old Town Road” was more than a massive hit, with the most weeks at No. 1 in Billboard Hot 100 history. It is also a prism through which to track the evolution of popular music consumption and the ways race influences how the music industry categorizes songs and artists. By both lionizing and satirizing genre tropes—it’s a country song built from an alternative rock sample, a hip-hop song in which nobody raps, a comical song that transcends novelty, and a queer anthem—Lil Nas X troubles the very idea of genre. Ultimately, Molanphy shows how “Old Town Road” channeled decades of Americana to point the way toward our cultural future.

Though Wallace Stevens’ shorter poems are perhaps his best known, his longer poems, Helen Vendler suggests in this book, deserve equal fame and equal consideration. Stevens’ central theme—the worth of the imagination—remained with him all his life, and Mrs. Vendler therefore proposes that his development as a poet can best be seen, not in description—which must be repetitive—of the abstract bases of his work, but rather in a view of his changing styles.

The author presents here a chronological account of fourteen longer poems that span a thirty-year period, showing, through Stevens’ experiments in genre, diction, syntax, voice, imagery, and meter, the inventive variety of Stevens’s work in long forms, and providing at the same time a coherent reading of these difficult poems. She concludes, “Stevens was engaged in constant experimentation all his life in an attempt to find the appropriate vehicle for his expansive consciousness; he found it in his later long poems, which surpass in value the rest of his work.”

In his essay “Compensation,” Emerson makes a surprising claim: “Every soul is by this intrinsic necessity quitting its whole system of things, its friends, and home, and laws, and faith, as the shell-fish crawls out of its beautiful but stony case, because it no longer admits of its growth, and slowly forms a new house.”Branka Arsić unpacks Emerson’s repeated assertion that our reality and our minds are in constant flux. Arsić’s readings of a broad range of Emerson’s writings—the Early Lectures, Journals and Notebooks, and later lectures—are guided by a central question: what does it really mean to maintain that everything fluctuates, is relational, and so changes its identity?Reading Emerson through this lens, Arsić asks: How is the leaving of one’s own consciousness actually to be performed? What kind of relationship is predicated on the necessity of leaving? What does it mean for our system of values, our ethics and our political allegiances, and even our personal identities to be on the move? The bold new understanding of Emerson that results redefines inherited concepts of the Emersonian individual as all-composed, willful, appropriative, and self-reliant. In its place, Arsić reveals an Emersonian individual whose ideal being is founded in mutability.

One of America's most important poets, John Ashbery has dazzled readers with the elusive pleasures of his work for over four decades. John Shoptaw heightens those pleasures by discovering the inner and outer workings of this incomparable poet. In readings attuned to the textual, sexual, and historical specificities of Ashbery's poetic project, from Some Trees through the vast summation of Flow Chart, Shoptaw introduces readers to the poet's processes of production.

The first reader with full access to Ashbery's manuscripts and source materials, he is able to reveal the poet at work. He shows us, for instance, how Ashbery built “Europe” and “The Skaters” upon children's books picked up at a Paris quai and how he drew on his own unpublished lyrics for the long dialogue “Fantasia on The Nut-Brown Maid.” Shoptaw argues that Ashbery's poems are less self-referential or nonrepresentational than misrepresentative: fractious assemblies of odd details, cryptic substitutions, and artful and artless discourses. He traces Ashbery's misrepresentative poetics to diverse sources—Walt Whitman, Raymond Roussel, W. H. Auden, Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Bishop, Jackson Pollock, and Elliott Carter, among others. Ashbery's poetry, as Shoptaw demonstrates, is inevitably “homotextual” while refraining from taking homosexuality as a topic.

Ashbery disorients his poems with unexpected silences, lapses or wrong turns in arguments, mock confessions, and sudden abstractions. As this book reveals, Ashbery's misrepresentations yield a richer and stranger representation of ordinary experience. Ashbery takes his paradoxical stand on the outside looking out of an American culture and history we recognize as our own.

The One Thomas More carefully studies the central humanist and polemical texts written by More to illustrate a coherent development of thought.

More than twenty years after its original appearance in Italian, The Open Work remains significant for its powerful concept of "openness"--the artist's decision to leave arrangements of some constituents of a work to the public or to chance--and for its striking anticipation of two major themes of contemporary literary theory: the element of multiplicity and plurality in art, and the insistence on literary response as an interactive process between reader and text. The questions Umberto Eco raises, and the answers he suggests, are intertwined in the continuing debate on literature, art, and culture in general.

This entirely new edition, edited for the English-language audience with the approval of Eco himself, includes an authoritative introduction by David Robey that explores Eco's thought at the period of The Open Work, prior to his absorption in semiotics. The book now contains key essays on Eco's mentor Luigi Pareyson, on television and mass culture, and on the politics of art. Harvard University Press will publish separately and simultaneously the extended study of James Joyce that was originally part of The Open Work, entitled The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce. The Open Work explores a set of issues in aesthetics that remain central to critical theory, and does so in a characteristically vivid style. Eco's convincing manner of presenting ideas and his instinct for the lively example are threaded compellingly throughout. This book is at once a major treatise in modern aesthetics and an excellent introduction to Eco's thought.

There have been many studies of George Orwell’s life and work, but nothing quite like this book by Alex Woloch—an exuberant, revisionary account of Orwell’s writing.

“Good prose is like a window-pane,” Orwell famously avers. But what kind of literary criticism is possible, face-to-face with Orwell’s plain-style prose? Too often this style has been either dismissed by a seemingly more savvy critical theory, or held up as a reprimand against the enterprise of theory. In a series of unusually close and intensive readings—focused on the unstable event of writing itself—Woloch recovers the radical and experimental energies of Orwell’s prose. Against accounts that would quickly naturalize Orwell’s truthfulness or reduce his window-pane prose to bad faith, Woloch’s study bears down on a propulsive irony and formal restlessness that have always been intertwined with Orwell’s plain-style. Such restlessness, far from diluting Orwell’s democratic and socialist politics, is at its aesthetic and conceptual core.

The first half of Or Orwell ranges across his nonfiction prose, including new readings of “A Hanging,” The Road to Wigan Pier, and Inside the Whale. The second half develops an extended analysis of a single writing project: Orwell’s eighty “As I Please” newspaper columns, written for the Socialist weekly Tribune. Moving through multiple forms and genres, testing the limits of each, Orwell emerges in Woloch’s fine-grained account as a boldly unconventional writer and a central figure in twentieth-century literature and political thought.

Oral intertextuality is an innate feature of the web of myth, whose interrelated fabrics allow the audience of epic song to have access to an entire horizon of diverse variants of a story. The Oral Palimpsest argues that just as the erased text of a palimpsest still carries traces of its previous writing, so the Homeric tradition unfolds its awareness of alternative versions in the act of producing the signs of their erasure.

In this light, "Homer" reflects the concerted effort to create a Panhellenic canon of epic song, through which we can still retrieve the poikilia (roughly, "dappled, embroidered variation") of various interwoven fabrics belonging to recognizable song-traditions or even older Indo-European strata.

Between 1932 and 1934, José Clemente Orozco painted the twenty-four-panel mural cycle entitled The Epic of American Civilization in Dartmouth College's Baker-Berry Library. An artifact of Orozco's migration from Mexico to the United States, the Epic represents a turning point in his career, standing as the only fresco in which he explores both US-American and Mexican narratives of national history, progress, and identity. While his title invokes the heroic epic form, the mural indicts history as complicit in colonial violence. It questions the claims of Manifest Destiny in the United States and the Mexican desire to mend the wounds of conquest in pursuit of a postcolonial national project. In Orozco's American Epic Mary K. Coffey places Orozco in the context of his contemporaries, such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and demonstrates the Epic's power as a melancholic critique of official indigenism, industrial progress, and Marxist messianism. In the process, Coffey finds within Orozco's work a call for justice that resonates with contemporary debates about race, immigration, borders, and nationality.

The great Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) is widely recognized as one of the most consequential human beings of the twentieth century. Through his writings and moral witness, he illumined the nature of totalitarianism and helped bring down an ‘evil empire.’ His courage and tenacity are acknowledged even by his fiercest critics. Yet the world-class novelist, historian, and philosopher (one uses the latter term in its capacious Russian sense) has largely been eclipsed by a caricature that has transformed a measured and self-critical patriot into a ferocious nationalist, a partisan of local self-government into a quasi-authoritarian, a man of faith and reason into a narrow-minded defender of Orthodoxy. The caricature, widely dispensed in the press, and too often taken for granted, gets in the way of a thoughtful and humane confrontation with the “other” Solzhenitsyn, the true Solzhenitsyn, who is a writer and thinker of the first rank and whose spirited defense of liberty is never divorced from moderation. It is to the recovery of this Solzhenitsyn that this book is dedicated.
This book above all explores philosophical, political, and moral themes in Solzhenitsyn’s two masterworks, The Gulag Archipelago and The Red Wheel, as well as in his great European novel In the First Circle. We see Solzhenitsyn as analyst of revolution, defender of the moral law, phenomenologist of ideological despotism, and advocate of “resisting evil with force.” Other chapters carefully explore Solzhenitsyn’s conception of patriotism, his dissection of ideological mendacity, and his controversial, but thoughtful and humane discussion of the “Jewish Question” in the Russian – and Soviet twentieth century. Some of Solzhenitsyn’s later writings, such as the “binary tales” that he wrote in the 1990s, are subject to critically appreciative analysis. And a long final chapter comments on Solzhenitsyn’s July 2007 Der Spiegel interview, his last word to Russia and the West. He is revealed to be a man of faith and freedom, a patriot but not a nationalist, and a principled advocate of self-government for Russia and the West.
  A final Appendix reproduces the beautiful Introduction (“The Gift of Incarnation”) that the author’s widow, Natalia Solzhenitsyn, wrote to the 2009 Russian abridgment of The Gulag Archipelago, a work that is now taught in Russian high schools.
 

One of the greatest living poets in English here explores the work of six writers he often finds himself reading "in order to get started" when writing, poets he turns to as "a poetic jump-start for times when the batteries have run down." Among those whom John Ashbery reads at such times are John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert. Less familiar than some, under Ashbery's scrutiny these poets emerge as the powerful but private and somewhat wild voices whose eccentricity has kept them from the mainstream--and whose vision merits Ashbery's efforts, and our own, to read them well.



Deeply interesting in themselves, Ashbery's reflections on these poets of "another tradition" are equally intriguing for what they tell us about Ashbery's own way of reading, writing, and thinking. With its indirect clues to his work and its generous and infectious appreciation of a remarkable group of poets, this book conveys the passion, delight, curiosity, and insight that underlie the art and craft of poetry for writer and reader alike. Even as it invites us to discover the work of poets in Ashbery's other tradition, it reminds us of Ashbery's essential place in our own.

James Joyce began his literary career as an Irishman writing to protest the deplorable conditions of his native country. Today, he is an icon in a field known as "Joyce studies." Our Joyce explores this amazing transformation of a literary reputation, offering a frank look into how and for whose benefit literary reputations are constructed.

Joseph Kelly looks at five defining moments in Joyce's reputation. Before 1914, when Joyce was most in control of his own reputation, he considered himself an Irish writer speaking to the Dublin middle classes. When T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound began promoting Joyce in 1914, however, they initiated a cult of genius that transformed Joyce into a prototype of the "egoist," a writer talking only to other writers.

This view served the purposes of Morris Ernst in the 1930s, when he defended Ulysses against obscenity charges by arguing that geniuses were incapable of obscenity and that they wrote only for elite readers. That view of Joyce solidified in Richard Ellmann's award-winning 1950s biography, which portrayed Joyce as a self-centered genius who cared little for his readers and less for the world at war around him. The biography, in turn, led to Joyce's canonization by the academy, where a "Joyce industry" now flourishes within English departments.

Months before Alma López's digital collage Our Lady was shown at the Museum of International Folk Art in 2001, the museum began receiving angry phone calls from community activists and Catholic leaders who demanded that the image not be displayed. Protest rallies, prayer vigils, and death threats ensued, but the provocative image of la Virgen de Guadalupe (hands on hips, clad only in roses, and exalted by a bare-breasted butterfly angel) remained on exhibition.

Highlighting many of the pivotal questions that have haunted the art world since the NEA debacle of 1988, the contributors to Our Lady of Controversy present diverse perspectives, ranging from definitions of art to the artist's intention, feminism, queer theory, colonialism, and Chicano nationalism. Contributors include the exhibition curator, Tey Marianna Nunn; award-winning novelist and Chicana historian Emma Pérez; and Deena González (recognized as one of the fifty most important living women historians in America).

Accompanied by a bonus DVD of Alma López's I Love Lupe video that looks at the Chicana artistic tradition of reimagining la Virgen de Guadalupe, featuring a historic conversation between Yolanda López, Ester Hernández, and Alma López, Our Lady of Controversy promises to ignite important new dialogues.

The fundamental difference between rhetoric and poetry, according to Yeats, is that rhetoric is the expression of one’s quarrels with others while poetry is the expression (and sometimes the resolution) of one’s quarrel with oneself. This is where Helen Vendler’s Our Secret Discipline begins. Through exquisite attention to outer and inner forms, Vendler explores the most inventive reaches of the poet’s mind. This book is a space-clearing gesture, an attempt to write about lyric forms in Yeats in unprecedented and comprehensive ways. The secret discipline of the poet is his vigilant attention to forms—whether generic, structural, or metrical. Yeats explores the potential of such forms to give shape and local habitation to volatile thoughts and feelings.

Helen Vendler remains focused on questions of singular importance: Why did Yeats cast his poems into the widely differing forms they ultimately took? Can we understand Yeats’s poetry better if we pay attention to inner and outer lyric form? Chapters of the book take up many Yeatsian ventures, such as the sonnet, the lyric sequence, paired poems, blank verse, and others. With elegance and precision, Vendler offers brilliant insights into the creative process and speculates on Yeats’s aims as he writes and rewrites some of the most famous poems in modern literature.

The writer Nakagami Kenji (1946-1992) rose to fame in the mid-1970s for his vivid stories about a clan scarred by violence and poverty on the underside of the Japanese economic miracle. Drawing upon the lives, experiences, and languages of the burakumin, the outcaste communities long discriminated against in Japanese society as a defiled underclass, Nakagami's works of fiction and nonfiction record with vitality and violence the realities—actual and imagined—of buraku culture.

In this critical study of Nakagami's life and oeuvre, Eve Zimmerman delves into the writer's literary world, exploring the genres, forms, and themes with which Nakagami worked and experimented. These chapters trace the biographical thread running through his works while foregrounding such diverse facets of his writing as his interest in the modern possibilities of traditional myths and forms of storytelling, his deployment of shocking tropes and images, and his crafting of a unique poetic language.

By bringing to the fore the literary urgency and social engagement that informed all aspects of Nakagami's creative and intellectual production, from his works of prose and poetry to his criticism, this book argues eloquently and effectively for us to appreciate Nakagami as a distinctive and relevant voice in modern Japanese literature.