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Original title in French: Traduction en innovation.

This magnificent and witty study by an unrecognized innovator seeks to define and explore the nature of "nonsense" in literature. Relying mainly on readings of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, Elizabeth Sewell not only sets out plausible boundaries for what or does not constitutes gibberish, but elucidates just how much of what is considered "sensible" writing must rely on nonsense for its power. Comparable only to the greatest works of Viktor Shklovsky, The Field of Nonsense is a masterpiece of American literary criticism.

Fiction Now reports on the current states of the novel in France, taking a series of soundings within the compass of innovative French writing since 2001. Chapters focus closely upon Jean Echenoz, Marie Redonnet, Christian Gailly, Lydie Salvayre, Gerard Gavarry, Helene Lenoir, Patrick Lapeyre, and Christine Montalbetti. Each of the authors invoked exemplified in his or her work a different set of strategies, concerns, and approaches: one of them transposes the Book of Judith to the Parisian suburbs; another imagines the most taciturn of cowboys in the American West; still another goes well beyond death, into the afterlife of a concert pianist. Despite their diversity of theme and technique, these writers share a will to make French fiction new, and demonstrate compellingly that the novel as it is practiced in France today is an extremely vigorous, deeply enthralling, and richly plural cultural form.

French Fiction Today focuses on the French novel in the twenty-first century, examining a series of works that are exemplary of broader currents in the genre. Each of these texts wagers insistently upon our willingness to speculate about literature and its uses, in an age when the value of literature is no longer taken as axiomatic. Each of these texts may be thought of as a critical novel, a form that calls upon us to engage with it in a critical manner, promising that meaning will arise in the articulation of writing and reading. Each of these authors participates in a debate about what the novel is as a cultural form in our present-and about what it may become, in a future that begins right now.

Deals with walking and on the literature of walking. This work leads the reader through Romantic, modern and contemporary literature to show readers the shared pleasures of reading, writing and walking.

The influential, daring, and lacerating novels of Ann Quin were very much products of their time-but Quin herself had more than a little influence upon shaping the era in which she lived. Her works bracket the '60s and embrace their drive to experiment and break through to another form of consciousness, and so another means of telling stories, as J. G. Ballard, and B. S. Johnson were doing, and as, later-in many ways following directly in Quin's footsteps-Kathy Acker would as well. In reading Quin we are taught to question the very enterprise of fiction itself; to read Quin one must be prepared to lose one's way. Re: Quin is an unabashedly personal and partisan critical biography of one of the greatest and yet most neglected fiction writers of the so-called "e;experimental"e; wave of British novelists of the 1960s.

Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003), one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century French literature, produced a wide variety of essays and fictions that reflect on the complexities of literary work. His description of writing continually returns to a number of themes, such as solitude, passivity, indifference, anonymity, and absence-forces confronting the writer, but also the reader, the text itself, and the relations between the three. For Blanchot, literature involves a movement toward disappearance, where one risks the loss of self; but such a sacrifice, says Blanchot, is inherent in the act of writing. Approaching Disappearance explores the question of disappearance in Blanchot's critical work and then turns to five narratives that offer a unique reflection on the threat of disappearance and the demands of literature-work by Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Louis-Rene Des Forets, and Nathalie Sarraute.

An investigation into the problem of writing about matter in Nikolai Gogol's work and, indirectly, into the entire Neoplatonic tradition in Russian literature, this book is not intended to be an exhaustive historical survey of the concept of matter, but rather an effort to enumerate the images of matter in Gogol's texts and to specify the rules of their construction. The trajectory of the book is directed by movement from Gogol to Gogol. Its major assumption is that Gogol successfully develops a language for grasping the Neoplatonic concept of matter and subsequently rejects it, abandoning literature. Since then, the Gogolian form [sic!] of the image of a sheer negation of form has recurred frequently in Russian literature. Yet the direction of the movement is always towards Gogol. Somewhere at the margin of this circular trajectory, one can inscribe a Polish writer, Witold Gombrowicz, who established, one hundred years later, a similar rhythm governing Polish literature: from Gombrowicz to Gombrowicz.

I Am Otherwise: The Romance between Poetry and Theory after the Death of the Subject examines the contemporary poet's relationship with language in the age of theory. As the book works through close readings and interpretations of Adrienne Rich and Harold Bloom, John Ashbery and Paul de Man, Jorie Graham and Maurice Blanchot, and Barrett Watten and Jacques Lacan, it shows how the main psychological modes of contemporary poetry and the postmodern poet are anxiety, irony, abjection, and destitution. The book ultimately concludes that the new theoretical poetry self-consciously renders the effect of critical theory in its own construction. Whereas poets of the past tarried with nature, self, or philosophy, poets of our time unite lyric feeling with literary theory itself.

Collecting twenty essays written by distinguished scholars from the United States and Germany, The Holodeck in the Garden offers an informative tour of the complex interrelations between science, technology, and contemporary American literature.

This is the first full-scale biography of one of the most elusive and enigmatic painters of our time: the self-proclaimed Count Balthus Klossowski de Rola, whose brilliant, markedly sexualized portraits, especially of young girls, are among the most memorable images in contemporary art.Balthus¿s complexities are clarified and his genius understood in this book that derives its immediacy from Nicholas Fox Weber¿s long and intense conversations with Balthus himself¿who never previously consented to discuss his life and work with a biographer¿as well as Weber¿s interviews with the artist¿s closest associates. This biography was first published by Knopf in 1999 and is now available for the first time from Dalkey Archive Press.

"This is one of the best short books of literary criticism that I know." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Lif itself is the first book-length study in English of the great Flemish writer Louis Paul Boon. A.M.A. van den Oever begins by questioning the paradox between Boon's international reputation as a significant innovator of the novel, and the peculiarly reductive biographical interpretations regularly uttered by some of his fellow countrymen and contemporaries. She looks for answers in Boon's misinterpreted "primitive" Flemish and analyzes the so-called refined pseudo-primitive style within both the grotesque tradition (Kafka, van Ostaijen, Gogol) and the sceptical, radical tradition of Nietzsche. In addition, she offers fresh insight into Boon's character Boontje, seen by many as a diminutive for the writer himself, outlining the sublime and slightly sinister relation of this quasi-comical character to its mighty creator.

This book examines the first five novels of Rayner Heppenstall (1911-1981). During his lifetime, many critics cited Heppenstall as the founder of the nouveau roman, believing his debut novel, The Blaze of Noon (1939), anticipated the post-war innovations of French writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarratue. Since his death, however, Heppenstall's reputation has faded, and his fiction is out of print. His final novels, written during a descent into madness, were structurally simplistic and politically unpalatable, and their disastrous critical reception clouded critical judgment of his previous novels. Gareth Buckell examines the importance of technical experimentation, rather than the ideological content, within Heppenstall's earlier works, and seeks a more favorable standing for Heppenstall within our critical and cultural memory.

In this short, brilliant book, Viktor Shklovsky enunciates the function of the arts: what they are and, just as importantly, what they are not. In the course of defining what art is, by implication he also quietly lays to waste the theories and people who view art as a means of representing "the real world" and a method of communication. His views of the other arts then lead him into his speculations about the art of cinema photography, new at the time that Shklovsky composed his polemic in 1923.

Nicholas Mosley is a writer for whom fiction is a way both to convey and confront the paradoxes and dilemmas of life.

A classic study of the art of translation from one of our greatest translators.

Since his first novel was published in 1985, Richard Powers has assembled a body of work whose intellectual breadth and imaginative energy bears comparison with that of any writer working today. Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers pays tribute to that achievement by collecting seventeen essays--written by leading literary critics, philosophers, and a novelist--each of which offers important insights into Powers's narrative craft and the intellectual grids that underlie his work. Powers's novels are distinguished by both their multiple narrative forms and their sophisticated synthesis of diverse fields of knowledge; to attempt to adequately address this range, the contributors to this volume mix their study of Powers's narrative innovations with eclectic interdisciplinary perspectives, which range from photography and systems theory, to ecocriticism and neuroscience. The volume concludes with an essay by Powers himself, that explores his philosophy of the novel.

In Reading Games, Kimberly Bohman-Kalaja guides us through an entertaining and instructive exploration of a neglected literary genre, the Play-Text. Focusing on the works of Flann O'Brien, Samuel Beckett, and Georges Perec, Bohman-Kalaja's book provides insightful analysis of game and play theories, as well as a new perspective on the world of experimental fiction -- discovering, step by step, the innovative strategies of those authors who play reading games.

From Moby-Dick to The Unnamable, from A Tale of a Tub to The Book of Questions, Bruce Kawin explores the nature of self-conscious fiction and compares its structure to that of human consciousness. Focusing on texts that confront their own limits by trying to name the unnamable, the ineffable self, Kawin draws on methods from literary criticism to systems theory to explain a variety of first-person works that "dance around the ungraspable subject."

The British novelist and critic Christine Brooke-Rose (born 1923) is increasingly being regarded as one of the most significant writers of the contemporary period. In her dozen novels she has explored themes as diverse as biligualism (as a metaphor for alienation) and the influence of computer technology on the humanities.As these themes suggest, Brooke-Rose is sometimes perceived as a difficult writer, especially given the dazzling virtuosity of the linguistic wordplay that enlivens her later novels. "Utterly Other Discourse" (a phrase from her 1984 novel "Amalgamemnon") provides a valuable introduction to her work; in fifteen essays--some previously published, some written for this book--scholars from America, England, and Europe examine her work from a variety of critical angles.

First published in 1923, Knight's Move is a collection of articles and short critical pieces that Viktor Shklovsky, no doubt the most original literary critic and theoretician of the twentieth century, wrote for the newspaper The Life of Art between 1919 and 1921. With his usual epigrammatic, acerbic wit and genius, Shklovsky pillories the bad writers, artists, and critics of his time, especially those who used art as a political or social tool. And at no time is Shklovsky better than when he insists with indignation and outrage that "Art has always been free of life. Its flag has never reflected the color of the flag that flies over the city fortress." As fresh and revolutionary today as they were when written nearly a century ago, these pieces promise to infuriate an English-speaking readership as much as the Russian one of the 1920s.