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8128 books match the query 'Literary Criticism' and 189 start with o
Omnicompetent Modernists
Poetry, Politics, and the Public SphereMatthew Hofer
University of Alabama Press, 2022
An innovative exploration of early twentieth-century avant-garde poetry’s relationship to the public sphere
“It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there,” as the poet William Carlos Williams memorably declared. In Omnicompetent Modernists: Poetry, Politics, and the Public Sphere, Matthew Hofer examines, through a multilayered literary critique of interwar modernist poetry, what it might mean to get the news, and more, from a poet.
Using pragmatist ideas about the public sphere as a tool, Hofer reveals how Langston Hughes, Ezra Pound, and Mina Loy sought to use literature to both express and enable thought. In Hughes, Pound, and Loy, Hofer attends to poets whose work vigorously imagined possible new relationships between language, thinking, and public society. Each poet had different goals and used different methods, but all found both inspiration and encouragement in popular political theory. Hughes advocated for a more just vision of color and class in the United States. Pound sought to condemn those whom he associated with public harm, linguistically, socially, economically, and politically. Loy championed the “psycho-democratic” representation of women, in both public and private life.
Although Hughes, Pound, and Loy are rarely considered together, what unites these three writers is how each reconceived the public realm, and revolutionized aesthetic form to articulate those visions. Hofer combines sharp intellectual historiography with rigorous literary criticism and the result is a study that reinvigorates both the poems and poets under consideration and speaks to the immense power of language in manipulating public opinion—with pertinent implications for the politics of the present.
On American Fiction
Jean-Paul Sartre
Seagull Books, 2021
Iconic French novelist, playwright, and essayist Jean-Paul Sartre is widely recognized as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work has remained relevant and thought-provoking through the decades. The Seagull Sartre Library now presents some of his most incisive philosophical, cultural, and literary critical essays in twelve newly designed and affordable editions.
Sartre’s engagement with the literature of his day extended well beyond the works of his French contemporaries. This short volume testifies to his astonishing grasp of the nuances of American fiction, as he analyzes three of the most important twentieth-century writers: John Dos Passos, Vladimir Nabokov, and William Faulkner, whose “humanism,” writes Sartre, “is the only acceptable sort.”
On Anger
Race, Cognition, NarrativeBy Sue Kim
University of Texas Press, 2013
Anger is an emotion that affects everyone regardless of culture, class, race, or gender—but at the same time, being angry always results from the circumstances in which people find themselves. In On Anger, Sue J. Kim opens a stimulating dialogue between cognitive studies and cultural studies to argue that anger is always socially and historically constructed and complexly ideological, and that the predominant individualistic conceptions of anger are insufficient to explain its collective, structural, and historical nature.
On Anger examines the dynamics of racial anger in global late capitalism, bringing into conversation work on political anger in ethnic, postcolonial, and cultural studies with recent studies on emotion in cognitive studies. Kim uses a variety of literary and media texts to show how narratives serve as a means of reflecting on experiences of anger and also how we think about anger—its triggers, its deeper causes, its wrongness or rightness. The narratives she studies include the film Crash, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Devil on the Cross and Wizard of the Crow, and the HBO series The Wire. Kim concludes by distinguishing frustration and outrage from anger through a consideration of Stéphane Hessel’s call to arms, Indignez-vous! One of the few works that focuses on both anger and race, On Anger demonstrates that race—including whiteness—is central to our conceptions and experiences of anger.
On Bataille and Blanchot
Jean-Paul Sartre
Seagull Books, 2021
Iconic French novelist, playwright, and essayist Jean-Paul Sartre is widely recognized as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work has remained relevant and thought-provoking through the decades. The Seagull Sartre Library now presents some of his most incisive philosophical, cultural, and literary critical essays in twelve newly designed and affordable editions.
“There is a crisis of the essay,” begins Sartre as he ventures into a long analysis of the work of one of his contemporaries who he argues might save this form: Georges Bataille. From there, Sartre moves on in this compact volume to consider Aminadab, the most important work of another hugely influential philosopher, Maurice Blanchot, through whom, writes Sartre, “the literature of the fantastic continues the steady progress that will inevitably unite it, ultimately, with what it has always been.”
On Black Bandes Dessinées and Transcolonial Power
Michelle Bumatay
The Ohio State University Press, 2025
On Black Bandes Dessinées and Transcolonial Power is the first book-length study in English about Black francophone cartoonists and their work. Michelle Bumatay decenters Eurocentric conceptions of francophone comic art and foregrounds the ubiquity of Western racial stereotypes encoded in mainstream French and Belgian bandes dessinées as well as the imbalance of power between the Global North and the Global South carried over from the colonial era. By examining a diversity of Black cartoonists’ aesthetic and material responses to the colonially inherited medium of bandes dessinées, she argues that their innovations constitute important reparative work that combats racial stereotypes and challenges transcolonial power imbalances.
Bumatay demonstrates how Barly Baruti, Papa Mfumu’Eto, Marguerite Abouet, Japhet Miagotar, and other Black cartoonists throughout the francophone world employ a range of tactics to tell their own stories. Through a balance of historical context and close readings, she shows how these artists represent and comment on their everyday lives in a postcolonial reality, expose and critique racial capitalism and exploitation, and provide new ways of seeing and understanding Black francophone peoples and cultures.
On Boredom
Essays in Art and WritingEdited by Rye Dag Holmboe and Susan Morris
University College London, 2021
What do we mean when we say that we are bored? Contributors to this volume, which include artists, art historians, psychoanalysts, and a novelist, examine boredom in its manifold and uncertain reality. Each part of the book takes up a crucial moment in the history of boredom and presents it in a new light, taking the reader from the trials of the consulting room to the experience of hysteria in the nineteenth century. The book pays particular attention to boredom’s relationship with the sudden and rapid advances in technology that have occurred in recent decades, specifically technologies of communication, surveillance, and automation. On Boredom is idiosyncratic for its combination of image and text, and the artworks included in its pages—featuring Mathew Hale, Martin Creed, and Susan Morris—help turn this volume into a material expression of boredom itself. It will appeal to readers in the fields of art history, literature, cultural studies, and visual culture.
On Both Sides of the Tracks
Social Mobility in Contemporary French LiteratureMorgane Cadieu
University of Chicago Press, 2024
Social climbers have often been the core characters of novels. Their position between traditional tiers in society makes them touchstones for any political and literary moment, including our own. Morgane Cadieu’s study looks at a certain kind of social climber in contemporary French literature whom she calls the parvenant. Taken from the French term parvenu, which refers to one who is newly arrived, a parvenant is a character who shuttles between social groups. A parvenant may become part of a new social class but devises literary ways to come back, constantly undoing any fixed idea of social affiliation.
Focusing on recent French novels and autobiographies, On Both Sides of the Tracks speaks powerfully to issues of emancipation and class. Cadieu offers a fresh critical look at tales of social mobility in the work of Annie Ernaux, Kaoutar Harchi, Michel Houellebecq, Édouard Louis, and Marie NDiaye, among others, shedding fascinating light on upward mobility today as a formal, literary problem.
On Burning Ground
Thirty Years of Thinking About PoetrySandra M. Gilbert
University of Michigan Press, 2009
The highly esteemed literary critic and poet Sandra M. Gilbert is best known for her feminist literary collaborations with Susan Gubar, with whom she coauthored The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, as well as the three-volume No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century.
The essays assembled in On Burning Ground display Gilbert's astonishing range and explore poetics, personal identity, feminism, and modern and contemporary literature. Among the pieces gathered here are essays on D. H. Lawrence, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Louise Glück, as well as reviews and previously unpublished articles.
Sandra M. Gilbert is Distinguished Professor of English Emerita at the University of California, Davis. She is the recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, NEH, and Soros Foundation fellowships and is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems 1969-1999 and, most recently, Belongings.
Praise for Sandra M.Gilbert
"Sandra Gilbert's poems are beautifully situated at the intersection of craft and feeling. Belongings is a stellar collection by a virtuoso with heart."
---Billy Collins
". . . brilliantly combines literary and cultural criticism with the intimacy of memoir."
---Joyce Carol Oates
"An enduring contribution to the literature of grief."
---New York Times Book Review
Poets on Poetry collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.
On Camus
Jean-Paul Sartre
Seagull Books, 2021
Iconic French novelist, playwright, and essayist Jean-Paul Sartre is widely recognized as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work has remained relevant and thought-provoking through the decades. The Seagull Sartre Library now presents some of his most incisive philosophical, cultural, and literary critical essays in twelve newly designed and affordable editions.
Sartre met Albert Camus in Occupied France in 1943, and from the start, they were an odd pair: one from the upper reaches of French society; the other, a pied-noir born into poverty in Algeria. The love of “freedom,” however, quickly bound them in friendship, while their fight for justice united them politically. But in 1951 the two writers fell out spectacularly over their literary and political views, their split a media sensation in France. This volume holds up a remarkable mirror to that fraught relationship. It features an early review by Sartre of Camus’s The Stranger; his famous 1952 letter to Camus that begins, “Our friendship was not easy, but I shall miss it”; and a moving homage written after Camus’s sudden death in 1960.
On Close Reading
John Guillory
University of Chicago Press, 2025
At a time of debate about the future of “English” as a discipline and the fundamental methods of literary study, few terms appear more frequently than “close reading,” now widely regarded as the core practice of literary study. But what exactly is close reading, and where did it come from? Here John Guillory, author of the acclaimed Professing Criticism, takes up two puzzles. First, why did the New Critics—who supposedly made close reading central to literary study—so seldom use the term? And second, why have scholars not been better able to define close reading?
For Guillory, these puzzles are intertwined. The literary critics of the interwar period, he argues, weren’t aiming to devise a method of reading at all. These critics were most urgently concerned with establishing the judgment of literature on more rigorous grounds than previously obtained in criticism. Guillory understands close reading as a technique, a particular kind of methodical procedure that can be described but not prescribed, and that is transmitted largely by demonstration and imitation.
Guillory’s short book will be essential reading for all college teachers of literature. An annotated bibliography, curated by Scott Newstok, provides a guide to key documents in the history of close reading along with valuable suggestions for further research.
On Creaturely Life
Rilke, Benjamin, SebaldEric L. Santner
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Santner traces this theme of creaturely life from its poetic and philosophical beginnings in the first half of the twentieth century to the writings of the enigmatic German novelist W. G. Sebald. Sebald’s entire oeuvre, Santner argues, can be seen as an archive of creaturely life. For Sebald, the work on such an archive was inseparable from his understanding of what it means to engage ethically with another person’s history and pain, an engagement that transforms us from indifferent individuals into neighbors.
An indispensable book for students of Sebald, On Creaturely Life is also a significant contribution to critical theory.
On Dickinson
The Best from American LiteratureEdwin H. Cady
Duke University Press, 1990
On Drama
Boundaries of Genre, Borders of SelfMichael Goldman
University of Michigan Press, 2000
On Edge
Gender and Genre in the Work of Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and Leigh BrackettAshley Lawson
The Ohio State University Press, 2024
Honorable Mention, 2025 PCA Emily Toth Award For Best Single Work In Women’s Studies
Finalist, 2025 Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Awards, Best Critical/Biographical Category
Finalist, Bouchercon New Orleans 2025 Anthony Awards, Best Critical/Non-Fiction
Nominated for the 2025 Macavity Awards, Best Mystery-related Nonfiction/Critical
Ashley Lawson’s On Edge presents a new picture of postwar American literature, arguing that biases against genre fiction have unfairly disadvantaged the legacies of authors like Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and Leigh Brackett. Each of these women navigated a male-dominated postwar publishing world without compromising their values. Their category-defying treatment of gender roles and genre classifications created suspense in their work that spoke to the tensions of the “Age of Anxiety.” Lawson engages with foundational voices in American literature, genre theory, and feminism to argue that, by merging the dominant mode of literary realism with fantastical or heightened elements, Brackett, Jackson, and Highsmith responded to the big questions of their era with startling and unnerving answers. By elevating genre play to a marker of literary skill, Lawson contends, we can secure these writers a more prominent place within the canon of midcentury American literature and open the door for the recovery of their similarly innovative peers.
On Emerson
The Best from American LiteratureEdwin H. Cady and Louis J. Budd, eds.
Duke University Press, 1988
Presented in order of their first appearance, the articles in each volume constitute a revealing record of developing insights and important shifts of critical emphasis. Each article has opened a fresh line of inquiry, established a fresh perspective on a familiar topic, or settled a question that engaged the interest of experts.
On Faulkner
The Best from American LiteratureEdwin H. Cady and Louis J. Budd, editors
Duke University Press, 1989
Presented in order of their first appearance, the articles in each volume constitute a revealing record of developing insights and important shifts of critical emphasis. Each article has opened a fresh line of inquiry, established a fresh perspective on a familiar topic, or settled a question that engaged the interest of experts.
On Frost
The Best from American LiteratureEdwin H. Cady and Louis J. Budd, eds.
Duke University Press, 1991
Presented in order of their first appearance, the articles in each volume constitute a revealing record of developing insights and important shifts of critical emphasis. Each article has opened a fresh line of inquiry, established a fresh perspective on a familiar topic, or settled a question that engaged the interest of experts.
On Hawthorne
The Best from American LiteratureEdwin H. Cady and Louis J. Budd, eds.
Duke University Press, 1990
Presented in order of their first appearance, the articles in each volume constitute a revealing record of developing insights and important shifts of critical emphasis. Each article has opened a fresh line of inquiry, established a fresh perspective on a familiar topic, or settled a question that engaged the interest of experts.
On Henry James
The Best from American LiteratureEdwin H. Cady and Louis J. Budd, eds.
Duke University Press, 1990
Presented in order of their first appearance, the articles in each volume constitute a revealing record of developing insights and important shifts of critical emphasis. Each article has opened a fresh line of inquiry, established a fresh perspective on a familiar topic, or settled a question that engaged the interest of experts.
On Howells
The Best from American LiteratureEdwin H. Cady and Louis J. Budd, eds.
Duke University Press, 1993
Presented in order of their first appearance, the articles in each volume constitute a revealing record of developing insights and important shifts of critical emphasis. Each article has opened a fresh line of inquiry, established a fresh perspective on a familiar topic, or settled a question that engaged the interest of experts.
On Humor
The Best from American LiteratureLouis J. Budd and Edwin H. Cady, eds.
Duke University Press, 1992
Presented in order of their first appearance, the articles in each volume constitute a revealing record of developing insights and important shifts of critical emphasis. Each article has opened a fresh line of inquiry, established a fresh perspective on a familiar topic, or settled a question that engaged the interest of experts.
On Interpretive Conflict
John Frow
University of Chicago Press, 2019
On Interpretive Conflict delves into four case studies where sharply different sets of values come into play—gun control, anti-Semitism, the religious force of images, and climate change. In each case, Frow lays out the way these controversies unfold within interpretive regimes that establish what counts as an interpretable object and the protocols of evidence and proof that should govern it. Whether applied to a Shakespeare play or a Supreme Court case, interpretation, he argues, is at once rule-governed and inherently conflictual. Ambitious and provocative, On Interpretive Conflict will attract readers from across the humanities and beyond.
On James Baldwin
Colm Tóibín
Brandeis University Press, 2024
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.
On Longing
Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the CollectionSusan Stewart
Duke University Press, 1993
On Louise Gluck
Change What You SeeJoanne Feit Diehl, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2005
Glück, author of nine books of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Wild Iris, is noted for her searing honesty and compelling first-person personae. Though compared to world-famous verse by Sappho and Dickinson, Glück's poetry has remained curiously undigested among readers of contemporary poetry for some time. On Louise Glück gathers for the first time a diverse array of essays by the leading critics of this preeminent poet. Featuring a probing, extended interview with Glück, On Louise Glück traces the critical reception of her work and offers new insights into her imaginative, mysterious poetry.
On Mark Twain
The Best from American LiteratureLouis J. Budd and Edwin H. Cady, eds.
Duke University Press, 1987
On Melville
The Best from American LiteratureLouis J. Budd and Edwin H. Cady, eds.
Duke University Press, 1988
Presented in order of their first appearance, the articles in each volume constitute a revealing record of developing insights and important shifts of critical emphasis. Each article has opened a fresh line of inquiry, established a fresh perspective on a familiar topic, or settled a question that engaged the interest of experts.
On Merleau-Ponty
Jean-Paul Sartre
Seagull Books, 2021
Iconic French novelist, playwright, and essayist Jean-Paul Sartre is widely recognized as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work has remained relevant and thought-provoking through the decades. The Seagull Sartre Library now presents some of his most incisive philosophical, cultural, and literary critical essays in twelve newly designed and affordable editions.
This volume consists of a single long essay that analyzes the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), who was the leading phenomenological philosopher in France and the lead editor of the influential leftist journal Les Temps modernes, which he established with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1945. Written in the wake of Merleau-Ponty’s death, this essay is a moving tribute from one major philosopher to another.
On Moral Personhood
Philosophy, Literature, Criticism, and Self-UnderstandingRichard Eldridge
University of Chicago Press, 1989
Eldridge presents an extensive new interpretation of Kantian ethics that is deeply informed by Kant's aesthetics. He defends a revised version of Kantian universalism and a Kantian conception of the content of morality. Eldridge then turns to literature armed not with any a priori theory but with an interpretive stance inspired by Hegel's phenomenology of self-understanding, more or less naturalized, and by Wittgenstein's work on self-understanding as ongoing narrative-interpretive activity, a stance that yields Kantian results about the universal demands our nature places on itself.
Eldridge goes on to present readings of novels by Conrad and Austen and poetry by Wordsworth and Coleridge. In each text protagonists are seen to be struggling with moral conflicts and for self-understanding as moral persons. The route toward partial resolution of their conflicts is seen to involve multiple and ongoing activities of reading and interpreting. The result of this kind of interpretation is that such literature—literature that portrays protagonists as themselves readers and interpreters of human capacities for morality—is a primary source for the development of morally significant self-understanding. We see in the careers of these protagonists that there can be genuine and fruitful moral deliberation and valuable action, while also seeing how situated and partial any understanding and achievement of value must remain.
On Moral Personhood at once delineates the moral nature of persons; shows various conditions of the ongoing, contextualized, partial acknowledgment of that nature and of the exercise of the capacities that define it; and enacts an important way of reading literature in relation to moral problems. Eldridge's work will be important reading for moral philosophers (especially those concerned with Kant, Hegel, and issues dividing moral particularists from moral universalists), literary theorists (especially those concerned with the value of literature and its relation to philosophy and to moral problems), and readers and critics of Conrad, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Austen.
On Mount Vision
Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American PoetryNorman Finkelstein
University of Iowa Press, 2010
Plumbing what the poet Michael Palmer calls “the dimension of the Spirit, with that troublesome, rebarbative capital letter,” Norman Finkelstein’s On Mount Vision asks how and why the sacred has remained a basic concern of contemporary experimental poets in our secular age. By charting the wandering, together and apart, of poetry and belief, Finkelstein illustrates the rich tapestry formed by the warp and woof of poetry, and the play of Gnosticism, antinomianism, spiritualism, and shamanism, which have commonly been regarded as heretical and sometimes been outright suppressed.
This beautifully written work begins with an overview of the spiritual problematics found in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American poetry. Traveling slightly outside of the realm of the contemporary, Finkelstein’s discussions of Emerson, Whitman, and Eliot yield to close readings of the works of Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Ronald Johnson, Michael Palmer, Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, and Armand Schwerner. In restoring verse to its place alongside scripture, Finkelstein reminds us why the sacred remains crucial to our understanding of postmodern American poetry.
On Narrative
W. J. T. Mitchell
University of Chicago Press, 1981
On Novels and Novelists
Jean-Paul Sartre
Seagull Books, 2021
Iconic French novelist, playwright, and essayist Jean-Paul Sartre is widely recognized as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work has remained relevant and thought-provoking through the decades. The Seagull Sartre Library now presents some of his most incisive philosophical, cultural, and literary critical essays in twelve newly designed and affordable editions.
In this collection of brief, insightful essays, we find ourselves face to face with Sartre the literary critic, as he carefully examines the works of renowned French writers such as François Mauriac, Nathalie Sarraute, Jean Giraudoux, and Jules Renard. Most moving is an essay on André Gide, written right after his death, in which Sartre writes, “We thought him scared and embalmed; he dies and we discover how alive he was.”
On Our Own Ground
The Complete Writings of William Apess, a PequotWilliam Apess
University of Massachusetts Press, 1992
William Apess was the first Native American to fully, and publicly, speak out regarding the racism and unfair treatment that he and others endured. The author's writing is eloquently delivered, instilling the reader with a realistic framework of a political, historical, and personal mindset.
On Paradox
The Claims of TheoryElizabeth S. Anker
Duke University Press, 2022
On Persistence
Rebecca Comay
Seagull Books, 2026
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 Poe
The Best from American LiteratureLouis J. Budd and Edwin H. Cady, eds.
Duke University Press, 1993
Presented in order of their first appearance, the articles in each volume constitute a revealing record of developing insights and important shifts of critical emphasis. Each article has opened a fresh line of inquiry, established a fresh perspective on a familiar topic, or settled a question that engaged the interest of experts.
On Poetry
Jean-Paul Sartre
Seagull Books, 2021
Iconic French novelist, playwright, and essayist Jean-Paul Sartre is widely recognized as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work has remained relevant and thought-provoking through the decades. The Seagull Sartre Library now presents some of his most incisive philosophical, cultural, and literary critical essays in twelve newly designed and affordable editions.
On Poetry includes two long essays in this slim volume. The first explores the Négritude poetry movement by analyzing the work of several Black poets of the time. The second is a meditation on the poetry of renowned French author Francis Ponge (1899–1988), who, influenced by surrealism, developed his unique form of prose poetry.
On Repetition
Writing, Performance and ArtEdited by Eirini Kartsaki
Intellect Books, 2016
On Robert Antelme's The Human Race
Essays and CommentaryRobert Antelme
Northwestern University Press, 2003
In this volume, the extraordinary nature and extent of Robert Antelme's accomplishment, and of the reverberations he set in motion in French life and literature, finds eloquent expression. The pieces Antelme wrote for journals—including essays on "principles put to the test," man as the "basis of right," and the question of revenge—appear here alongside appreciations of The Human Race by authors from Perec to Maurice Blanchot to Sarah Kofman. Also included are Antelme's personal recollections and interviews with, among others, Dionys Mascolo (who brought Antelme back from Dachau), Marguerite Duras (Antelme's wife, who tells of his return from Germany), and Mitterand.
Also available: Antelme's The Human Race
On SF
Thomas M. Disch
University of Michigan Press, 2005
"One of the most remarkably talented writers around."
---Washington Post Book World
"[Disch] is without doubt one of the really bright lights on the American SF scene."
---Fantasy and Science Fiction
This collection by the much-loved and lauded science-fiction writer Thomas Disch spans twenty-five years of his career, during which he has supplemented his creative output with reviews and critical essays in publications as diverse as the Nation, the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic Monthly, and Twilight Zone.
Disch's perspectives on his genre are skeptical, novel, and often incendiary. The volume's opening essay, for example, characterizes writers of science fiction as "the provincials of literature." Other essays explore science fiction's roots-Poe, Bradbury, Clarke, Asimov, Vonnegut-as well as modern practitioners such as Stephen King, Philip Dick, Robert Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and William Gibson.
Disch entertains and provokes with essays on UFOs, Science Fiction as a Church, and Newt Gingrich's Futurist Brain Trust. Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Madame Blavatsky also get the Disch treatment. Throughout, the writing is lively, agile, and irreverent, exhibiting an incisive honesty that is undiluted by Disch's own attachments as a sci-fi practitioner. On SF will appeal equally to lovers of science fiction and connoisseurs of the finest critical prose.
On Second Thought
James Gray
University of Minnesota Press, 1946
On Symbols and Society
Kenneth Burke
University of Chicago Press, 1989
In his superb introductory essay, Joseph R. Gusfield traces the development of Burke's approach to human action and its relationship to other similar sources of theory and ideas in sociology; he discusses both Burke's influence on sociologists and the limits of his perspective. Burke regards literature as a form of human behavior—and human behavior as embedded in language. His lifework represents a profound attempt to understand the implications for human behavior based on the fact that humans are "symbol-using animals." As this volume demonstrates, the work that Burke produced from the 1930s through the 1960s stands as both precursor and contemporary key to recent intellectual movements such as structuralism, symbolic anthropology, phenomenological and interpretive sociology, critical theory, and the renaissance of symbolic interaction.
On This Modern Highway, Lost in the Jungle
Tropics, Travel, and Colonialism in Czech PoetryJan Mrázek
Karolinum Press, 2022
In 1926, the Communist avant-garde poet Konstantin Biebl (1898–1951) traveled from Czechoslovakia to the Dutch East Indies. In the writings from his journal—texts simultaneously poetic and comic—both landlocked Bohemia and the colonized tropical islands are seen in disorienting new perspectives, like “mirrors looking at themselves in each other.”
Jan Mrázek’s On This Modern Highway, Lost in the Jungle takes us on a journey of our own, crisscrossing Biebl’s life and work—with particular attention to his travel writing—as they mirror Mrázek’s own experiences as a multinational academic: a Prague conservatory graduate, educated at Michigan and Cornell, and now a scholar of Indonesia living in Singapore. Biebl’s writings are also the book’s point of departure for a broader exploration of the intersections of travel and poetry, issues of colonial and social injustice, and the representation of otherness in the Czech literary and visual imagination. In its attention to how poetic travel reflects the Czech historical experience in the shadow of imperial nations, Mrázek’s book elevates scholarly reflection on literary travel, modernity, and colonialism to a new level.
On War and Writing
Samuel Hynes
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Samuel Hynes knows war personally: he served as a Marine Corps pilot in the Pacific Theater during World War II, receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross. He has spent his life balancing two careers: pilot and professor of literature. Hynes has written a number of major works of literary criticism, as well as a war-memoir, Flights of Passage, and several books about the World Wars. His writing is sharp, lucid, and has provided some of the most expert, detailed, and empathetic accounts of a disappearing generation of fighters and writers.
On War and Writing offers for the first time a selection of Hynes’s essays and introductions that explore the traditions of war writing from the twentieth century to the present. Hynes takes as a given that war itself—the battlefield uproar of actual combat—is unimaginable for those who weren’t there, yet we have never been able to turn away from it. We want to know what war is really like: for a soldier on the Somme; a submariner in the Pacific; a bomber pilot over Germany; a tank commander in the Libyan desert. To learn, we turn again and again to the memories of those who were there, and to the imaginations of those who weren’t, but are poets, or filmmakers, or painters, who give us a sense of these experiences that we can’t possibly know.
The essays in this book range from the personal (Hynes’s experience working with documentary master Ken Burns, his recollections of his own days as a combat pilot) to the critical (explorations of the works of writers and artists such as Thomas Hardy, E. E. Cummings, and Cecil Day-Lewis). What we ultimately see in On War and Writing is not military history, not the plans of generals, but the feelings of war, as young men expressed them in journals and poems, and old men remembered them in later years—men like Samuel Hynes.
On Whitman
The Best from American LiteratureEdwin H. Cady
Duke University Press, 1987
On William Stafford
The Worth of Local ThingsTom Andrews, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1995
The late William Stafford's poetry and essays have had a major influence on contemporary American poetry. Since his book Traveling Through the Dark won the National Book Award in 1963, his awards have grown exponentially as new work has appeared. The range of writers in the past four decades who have celebrated Stafford's work-- from Margaret Atwood to James Dickey-- is remarkable. On William Stafford: The Worth of Local Things helps clarify the precise nature of Stafford's influence by assembling the responses of some of our best poets and critics to his work, including Richard Hugo, Charles Simic, Louis Simpson, Robert Coles, Linda Pastan, and Robert Creeley. This collection offers a unique view of Stafford's sometimes controversial work and insight into several of the liveliest recent debates in poetics.
Tom Andrews is Assistant Professor of English, Ohio University.
On Writing with Photography
Karen Beckman
University of Minnesota Press, 2013
From James Agee to W. G. Sebald, there has been an explosion of modern documentary narratives and fiction combining text and photography in complex and fascinating ways. However, these contemporary experiments are part of a tradition that stretches back to the early years of photography. Writers have been integrating photographs into their work for as long as photographs have existed, producing rich, multilayered creations; and photographers have always made images that incorporate, respond to, or function as writing. On Writing with Photography explores what happens to texts—and images—when they are brought together.
From the mid-nineteenth century to the present, this collection addresses a wide range of genres and media, including graphic novels, children’s books, photo-essays, films, diaries, newspapers, and art installations. Examining the works of Herman Melville, Don DeLillo, Claude McKay, Man Ray, Dare Wright, Guy Debord, Zhang Ailing, and Roland Barthes, among others, the essays trace the relationship between photographs and “reality” and describe the imaginary worlds constructed by both, discussing how this production can turn into testimony of personal and collective history, memory and trauma, gender and sexuality, and ethnicity.
Together, these essays help explain how writers and photographers—past and present—have served as powerful creative resources for each other.
Contributors: Stuart Burrows, Brown U; Roderick Coover, Temple U; Adrian Daub, Stanford U; Marcy J. Dinius, DePaul U; Marianne Hirsch, Columbia U; Daniel H. Magilow, U of Tennessee, Knoxville; Janine Mileaf; Tyrus Miller, U of California, Santa Cruz; Leah Rosenberg, U of Florida; Xiaojue Wang, U of Pennsylvania.
On the Battlefield of Memory
The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919–1941Steven Trout
University of Alabama Press, 2010
This work is a detailed study of how Americans in the 1920s and 1930s interpreted and remembered the First World War. Steven Trout asserts that from the beginning American memory of the war was fractured and unsettled, more a matter of competing sets of collective memories—each set with its own spokespeople— than a unified body of myth. The members of the American Legion remembered the war as a time of assimilation and national harmony. However, African Americans and radicalized whites recalled a very different war. And so did many of the nation’s writers, filmmakers, and painters.
Trout studies a wide range of cultural products for their implications concerning the legacy of the war: John Dos Passos’s novels Three Soldiers and 1919, Willa Cather’s One of Ours, William March’s Company K, and Laurence Stallings’s Plumes; paintings by Harvey Dunn, Horace Pippin, and John Steuart Curry; portrayals of the war in The American Legion Weekly and The American Legion Monthly; war memorials and public monuments like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier; and commemorative products such as the twelve-inch tall Spirit of the American Doughboy statue.
Trout argues that American memory of World War I was not only confused and contradictory during the ‘20s and ‘30s, but confused and contradictory in ways that accommodated affirmative interpretations of modern warfare and military service. Somewhat in the face of conventional wisdom, Trout shows that World War I did not destroy the glamour of war for all, or even most, Americans and enhanced it for many.
On the Bullet Train with Emily Brontë
Wuthering Heights in JapanJudith Pascoe
University of Michigan Press, 2017
In this and in her previous book, The Sarah Siddons Audio Files, Pascoe’s engaging narrative innovates a new scholarly form involving immersive research practice to attempt a cross-cultural version of reader-response criticism. On the Bullet Train with Emily Brontë will appeal to scholars in the fields of 19th-century British literature, adaptation studies, and Japanese literary history.
On the Communicative Turn in Philosophy
Exploring Intersubjectivity, Community and the Ethics of DialogueClaude Mangion
Intellect Books, 2025
Philosophy has long grappled with questions of meaning and human connection, yet communication itself remains an underexplored concept in the field. Claude Mangion shifts the focus by examining how communication has shaped debates on intersubjectivity and ethics.
By tracing its role across key philosophical discussions, this book offers a new outlook on how dialogue informs our understanding of self and society. Accessible and rigorously argued, it bridges the gap between philosophy and communication theory, making it a useful reference for students and scholars alike. This work provides a compelling argument for thinking about communication as a philosophical practice, whether you’re exploring community, the ethics of dialogue, or the foundations of intersubjectivity.