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How do writers and filmmakers use repetition? It is useful when accenting an idea, but, in this original and thought-provoking book, Bruce F. Kawin argues that it serves a more important function as a manipulator of our sense of time and of the timeless. Brilliantly pitching the aesthetics of novelty against those of repetition, Kawin shows that the connections and rhythm of repetition offer revelations about literature and film, nature and memory, and time and art.

Legendary publisher and writer John Calder said of Barbara Wright that she was "the most brilliant, conscientious and original translator of 20th century French literature." Wright introduced to an English-speaking readership and audience some of the most innovative French literature of the last hundred years: a world without Alfred Jarry's "Ubu," Raymond Queneau's "Zazie," and Robert Pinget's "Monsieur Songe" scarcely bears thinking about. This wonderful collection of texts about and by Barbara Wright--including work by David Bellos, Breon Mitchell, and Nick Wadley, as well as a previously unpublished screenplay written and translated by Wright in collaboration with Robert Pinget--begins the work of properly commemorating a figure toward whom all of English letters owes an unpayable debt.

A dazzling collection of essays--on reading, writing, form, and thought--from one of America's master writers. Beginning with personal, both past and present, it emphasizes William H. Gass's lifelong attachment to books and then moves on to ponder the work of some of his favorite writers (among them Kafka, Nietzsche, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Proust). An essential addition to the Gassian canon, Life Sentences shows William H. Gass at his best.

With Flann O'Brien now widely acknowledged as a subversive genius of early post-modernism, Flore Coulouma gives the "question of language" a central position in his literary identity. Tracing O'Brien's philosophy of language to the convoluted structure of his writing, Coulouma demonstrates how his bilingualism and ambiguous relation to language inspired his satirical fiction and chronicles, and develops a series of narrative oppositions: orality and literacy, truth and fiction, authority and legitimacy, native and national language(s). Using such dialectical oppositions to stage O'Brien's literary representation of the diglossic relationship of speakers to their native tongue, this book casts light on O'Brien's own intuitions about the failures and achievements of language, the logic of fiction, the relation between language and knowledge, and the impossibility of a nation cut off from its original tongue finding its linguistic identity.

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.

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.

Original title in French: Traduction en innovation.