Results by title
324 books match the query 'Comparative literature' and 3 start with o
On James Baldwin
Colm Tóibín
Brandeis University Press, 2024
Colm Tóibín’s personal account of encountering James Baldwin’s work, published in Baldwin’s centenary year.
Acclaimed Irish novelist Colm Tóibín first read James Baldwin just after turning eighteen. He had completed his first year at an Irish university and was struggling to free himself from a religious upbringing. He had even considered entering a seminary and was searching for literature that would offer illumination and insight. Inspired by the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, Tóibín found a writer who would be a lifelong companion and exemplar.
From On James Baldwin
Baldwin was interested in the hidden and dramatic areas in his own being, and was prepared as a writer to explore difficult truths about his own private life. In his fiction, he had to battle for the right of his protagonists to choose or influence their destinies. He knew about guilt and rage and bitter privacies in a way that few of his White novelist contemporaries did. And this was not simply because he was Black and homosexual; the difference arose from the very nature of his talent, from the texture of his sensibility. “All art,” he wrote, “is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.”
On James Baldwin is a magnificent contemporary author’s tribute to one of his most consequential literary progenitors.
Acclaimed Irish novelist Colm Tóibín first read James Baldwin just after turning eighteen. He had completed his first year at an Irish university and was struggling to free himself from a religious upbringing. He had even considered entering a seminary and was searching for literature that would offer illumination and insight. Inspired by the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, Tóibín found a writer who would be a lifelong companion and exemplar.
From On James Baldwin
Baldwin was interested in the hidden and dramatic areas in his own being, and was prepared as a writer to explore difficult truths about his own private life. In his fiction, he had to battle for the right of his protagonists to choose or influence their destinies. He knew about guilt and rage and bitter privacies in a way that few of his White novelist contemporaries did. And this was not simply because he was Black and homosexual; the difference arose from the very nature of his talent, from the texture of his sensibility. “All art,” he wrote, “is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.”
On James Baldwin is a magnificent contemporary author’s tribute to one of his most consequential literary progenitors.
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On Persistence
Rebecca Comay
Seagull Books, 2026
A bold meditation on endurance as interruption rather than progress, offering a radical rethinking of time, agency, and survival.
On Persistence is an exploration into the elusive, unruly force of endurance—not as moral virtue or capitalist work ethic, but as a temporal and affective structure that resists assimilation. In these wide-ranging philosophical and literary essays, Rebecca Comay interrogates what it means to persist when progress stalls and resolution fails to arrive. Engaging figures from Freud to Beckett, Proust to Benjamin, Hamlet to Niobe, Comay tracks the strange temporality of suspended life: interminable mourning, unfinished projects, the persistence of the past, the undead stirrings of the death drive. What emerges is a radically different model of time—neither static nor teleological, but a form of interruption that opens space for rethinking agency, grief, resistance, and repair.
On Persistence offers a profound meditation on what it means to endure—and to endure differently—in a time that demands something else of us.
On Persistence is an exploration into the elusive, unruly force of endurance—not as moral virtue or capitalist work ethic, but as a temporal and affective structure that resists assimilation. In these wide-ranging philosophical and literary essays, Rebecca Comay interrogates what it means to persist when progress stalls and resolution fails to arrive. Engaging figures from Freud to Beckett, Proust to Benjamin, Hamlet to Niobe, Comay tracks the strange temporality of suspended life: interminable mourning, unfinished projects, the persistence of the past, the undead stirrings of the death drive. What emerges is a radically different model of time—neither static nor teleological, but a form of interruption that opens space for rethinking agency, grief, resistance, and repair.
On Persistence offers a profound meditation on what it means to endure—and to endure differently—in a time that demands something else of us.
[more]
Other Country
Barry Lopez and the Community of ArtistsJames Perrin Warren
University of Arizona Press, 2015
The award-winning American environmental writer Barry Lopez has traveled extensively in remote and populated parts of the world. Lopez’s fiction and nonfiction focus on the relationship between the physical landscape and human culture, posing abiding questions about ethics, intimacy, and place.
Other Country presents a full-scale treatment of Lopez’s work. James Perrin Warren examines the relationship between Lopez’s writing and the work of several contemporary artists, composers, and musicians, whose works range from landscape photography, painting, and graphic arts to earth art, ceramics, and avant-garde music. The author demonstrates Lopez’s role in creating this community of artists who have led cultural change, and shows that Lopez’s writing—and his engagement with the natural world—creates an “other country” by redefining boundaries, rediscovering a place, and renewing our perceptions of landscapes.
Warren’s critique examines manuscripts and typescripts from the 1960s to the present, interviews with Lopez conducted from 2008 to 2013, and interviews with artists. Part 1 focuses on the relationship between Lopez’s storytelling, which he calls “a conversation with the land,” and Robert Adams’s landscape photography. For both Lopez and Adams, a worthy artistic expression serves the cultural memory of a community, reminding us how to behave properly toward other people and the land. Part 2 looks at the collaborative friendship of Lopez and visual artist Alan Magee, tracking the development of Lopez’s short stories through a consideration of Magee’s career. Part 3 moves farther afield, discussing Lopez’s relationship to Richard Long’s earth art, Richard Rowland’s ceramics, and John Luther Adams’s soundscapes.
Other Country reveals the dynamic relationships between Lopez, considered by many the most important environmental writer working in America, and the artistic community, who seek to explore the spiritual and ethical dimensions of an honorable and attentive relationship to the land and thus offer profound implications for the future of the planet.
Other Country presents a full-scale treatment of Lopez’s work. James Perrin Warren examines the relationship between Lopez’s writing and the work of several contemporary artists, composers, and musicians, whose works range from landscape photography, painting, and graphic arts to earth art, ceramics, and avant-garde music. The author demonstrates Lopez’s role in creating this community of artists who have led cultural change, and shows that Lopez’s writing—and his engagement with the natural world—creates an “other country” by redefining boundaries, rediscovering a place, and renewing our perceptions of landscapes.
Warren’s critique examines manuscripts and typescripts from the 1960s to the present, interviews with Lopez conducted from 2008 to 2013, and interviews with artists. Part 1 focuses on the relationship between Lopez’s storytelling, which he calls “a conversation with the land,” and Robert Adams’s landscape photography. For both Lopez and Adams, a worthy artistic expression serves the cultural memory of a community, reminding us how to behave properly toward other people and the land. Part 2 looks at the collaborative friendship of Lopez and visual artist Alan Magee, tracking the development of Lopez’s short stories through a consideration of Magee’s career. Part 3 moves farther afield, discussing Lopez’s relationship to Richard Long’s earth art, Richard Rowland’s ceramics, and John Luther Adams’s soundscapes.
Other Country reveals the dynamic relationships between Lopez, considered by many the most important environmental writer working in America, and the artistic community, who seek to explore the spiritual and ethical dimensions of an honorable and attentive relationship to the land and thus offer profound implications for the future of the planet.
[more]