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The American Isherwood

James J. Berg and Chris Freeman (eds)

Novelist, memoirist, diarist, and gay pioneer Christopher Isherwood left a wealth of writings. Known for his crisp style and his camera-like precision with detail, Isherwood gained fame for his ... More

Novelist, memoirist, diarist, and gay pioneer Christopher Isherwood left a wealth of writings. Known for his crisp style and his camera-like precision with detail, Isherwood gained fame for his Berlin Stories, which served as source material for the hit stage musical and Academy Award-winning film Cabaret. More recently, his experiences and career in the United States have received increased attention. His novel A Single Man was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film; his long relationship with the artist Don Bachardy, with whom he shared an openly gay lifestyle, was the subject of an award-winning documentary, Chris & Don: A Love Story; and his memoir, Christopher and His Kind, was adapted for the BBC. Isherwood’s colorful journeys took him from post-World War I England to Weimar Germany to European exile to Golden Age Hollywood to Los Angeles in the full flower of gay liberation. After the publication of his diaries, which run to more than one million words and span nearly a half century, it is possible to fully assess his influence. This book considers Isherwood’s diaries, his vast personal archive, and his published works and offers a multifaceted appreciation of a writer who spent more than half of his life in southern California.Less

Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines

Susan McHugh

Beginning with a historical account of why animal stories pose endemic critical challenges to literary and cultural theory, this book argues that key creative developments in narrative form became ... More

Beginning with a historical account of why animal stories pose endemic critical challenges to literary and cultural theory, this book argues that key creative developments in narrative form became inseparable from shifts in animal politics and science in the past century. The book traces representational patterns specific to modern and contemporary fictions of cross-species companionship through a variety of media—including novels, films, fine art, television shows, and digital games—to show how nothing less than the futures of all species life is at stake in narrative forms. The book’s investigations into fictions of people relying on animals in civic and professional life—most obviously those of service animal users and female professional horse riders—showcase distinctly modern and human–animal forms of intersubjectivity. But increasingly graphic violence directed at these figures indicates their ambivalent significance to changing configurations of species.Less

At the Borders of Sleep: On Liminal Literature

Peter Schwenger

At the Borders of Sleep investigates a liminal or threshold state between two fundamental modes of human consciousness, the waking state and the sleeping one–which are not as distinct from one ... More

At the Borders of Sleep investigates a liminal or threshold state between two fundamental modes of human consciousness, the waking state and the sleeping one–which are not as distinct from one another as is commonly thought. Perhaps only at the borders of sleep can we get a sense of their connection. During true sleep we are unconscious; and while dreaming we uncritically accept what is happening to us, which we will later translate into untrustworthy waking narratives. As we are poised on the threshold of sleep, however, we can consciously observe what our preoccupied consciousness doesn’t usually admit during the day. Liminal states are so subtle and evanescent that only literary depictions can do them justice; and so literature, along with philosophy and some science, has generated this book’s argument. That argument is then turned back upon literature to show how both reading and writing are liminal experiences, taking place at the edges of conscious thought. The book has sections dealing with drowsiness, insomnia, and the moment of waking; it ends with a section titled “Sleepwaking,” which is devoted to literature–particularly “experimental” literature - that blurs dream and waking life. The authors considered in this study are a varied lot: among others, Marcel Proust, Stephen King, Paul Valéry, Fernando Pessoa, Franz Kafka, Giorgio de Chirico, Virginia Woolf, Philippe Sollers, and Robert Irwin.Less

Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America's Export Age

Ericka Beckman

Between 1870 and 1930, Latin American countries were incorporated into global capitalist networks like never before, mainly as exporters of raw materials and importers of manufactured goods. During ... More

Between 1870 and 1930, Latin American countries were incorporated into global capitalist networks like never before, mainly as exporters of raw materials and importers of manufactured goods. During this Export Age, entire regions were given over to the cultivation of export commodities such as coffee and bananas, capital and labor were relocated to new production centers, and barriers to foreign investment were removed. This book investigates the key role played by literature in imagining and interpreting the rapid transformations unleashed by Latin America’s first major wave of capitalist modernization. Using an innovative blend of literary and economic analysis and drawing from a rich interdisciplinary archive, this book provides the first extended evaluation of Export Age literary production. It traces the emergence of a distinct set of fictions, fantasies, and illusions that accompanied the rise of export-led, dependent capitalism. These “capital fictions” range from promotional pamphlets for Guatemalan coffee and advertisements for French fashions to novels about stock market collapse in Argentina and rubber extraction in the Amazon. The book explores how Export Age literature anticipated some of the key contradictions faced by contemporary capitalist societies, including extreme financial volatility, vast social inequality, and ever-more-intense means of exploitation. Questioning the opposition between culture and economics in Latin America and elsewhere, the book shows that literature operated as a powerful form of political economy during this period.Less

The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe

Rebekah Sheldon

The Child to Come reads American culture from the 1960s to the present as a period in which the anxious apprehension of nonhuman vitality has sought alleviation in the figure of the child. Yet the ... More

The Child to Come reads American culture from the 1960s to the present as a period in which the anxious apprehension of nonhuman vitality has sought alleviation in the figure of the child. Yet the salvific life of the child only assuages to the degree that it also gives expression to the forces of nonhuman vitality it was fitted to capture. Drawing on arguments in the field of childhood studies about the interweaving of the child with the life sciences, the book argues that neither life nor the child are what they used to be. Under pressure from ecological change, artificial reproductive technology, genetic engineering, and the neoliberalization of the economy, the child no longer serves a biopolitical technology trained on sexual subjectivity. Instead, the contemporary, queerly-human child signals the ascendancy of a new episteme: the biopolitics of reproduction. Thus, subjectivity is far less crucial than the direct intervention into life itself within the paradigmatic locus of the pregnant woman and the sacred child.Less

Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era

N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman (eds)

This book argues that the humanities may be re-invigorated by adopting a comparative media framework as a basis for curricula re-design, faculty scholarship, and student-oriented learning. With ... More

This book argues that the humanities may be re-invigorated by adopting a comparative media framework as a basis for curricula re-design, faculty scholarship, and student-oriented learning. With twelve essays ranging from classical Greek and Roman bookroll scrolls to locative street art, Renaissance documents to contemporary computer games, Comparative Textual Media offers a proof of concept for the surprising conjunctions and material specificities that a comparative textual media framework can energize and enable. With extraordinary historical range, these essays by outstanding scholars in a variety of fields demonstrate the promise of this paradigm to construct powerful comparisons and intervene constructively in contemporary discussions about the current state of the humanities.Less

Computing as Writing

Daniel Punday

Writing has long been used as a metaphor to understand computing. From the virtual desktop of modern operating systems to the way we name portable devices (the notebook computer, the iPad), writing ... More

Writing has long been used as a metaphor to understand computing. From the virtual desktop of modern operating systems to the way we name portable devices (the notebook computer, the iPad), writing provides a seemingly inevitable model for computing. This book explores the implications and contradictions of this metaphor. Writing not only provides a way to think about the operation of the computer, it also embodies the way that we think about the work that we do on the computer (programmers “writing code”) and how the often muddy line between our home and work life today. In the last decade, scholarship on digital media has sought rigor by limiting its work to particular hardware and software platforms. This book argues, instead, that we should embrace the power and muddiness of the writing metaphor for computing. Because computing isn’t simply a discipline or set of technologies, but also an idea that plays a role in contemporary culture, the cross-disciplinary migration of the writing metaphor is so important. This book seeks out the unlikely places where computing and writing, creativity and corporations converge—from debates about the scope of patent law in the U.S. to design trends within computer user interfaces to the representations of archaic writing technologies in the video games. These kinds of cross-disciplinary comparisons are only possible if we are willing to tolerate a broad understanding of the digital and the ways that it can invoke writing.Less

Creole Medievalism: Colonial France and Joseph Bédier's Middle Ages

Michelle R. Warren

Joseph Bédier (1864–1938) was one of the most famous scholars of his day. He held prestigious posts and lectured throughout Europe and the United States, an activity unusual for an academic of his ... More

Joseph Bédier (1864–1938) was one of the most famous scholars of his day. He held prestigious posts and lectured throughout Europe and the United States, an activity unusual for an academic of his time. A scholar of the French Middle Ages, he translated Tristan and Isolde as well as France’s national epic, The Song of Roland. Bédier was publicly committed to French hegemony, yet he hailed from a culture that belied this ideal—the island of Réunion in the southern Indian Ocean. This book demonstrates that Bédier’s relationship to this multicultural and economically peripheral colony motivates his nationalism in complex ways. Simultaneously proud of his French heritage and nostalgic for the island, Bédier defends French sovereignty based on an ambivalent resistance to his creole culture. The book shows that in the early twentieth century, influential intellectuals from Réunion helped define the new genre of the “colonial novel,” adopting a pro-colonial spirit that shaped both medieval and Francophone studies.Less

Dead Letters Sent: Queer Literary Transmission

Kevin Ohi

Literary texts that address tradition and the transmission of knowledge often seem concerned less with preservation than with loss, recurrently describing scenarios of what author Kevin Ohi terms ... More

Literary texts that address tradition and the transmission of knowledge often seem concerned less with preservation than with loss, recurrently describing scenarios of what author Kevin Ohi terms “thwarted transmission.” Such scenes, however, do not so much concede the impossibility of survival as look into what constitutes literary knowledge and whether it can properly be said to be an object to be transmitted, preserved, or lost. Beginning with general questions of transmission—the conveying of knowledge in pedagogy, the transmission and material preservation of texts and forms of knowledge, and even the impalpable communication between text and reader—Dead Letters Sent examines two senses of “queer transmission.” First, it studies the transmission of a minority sexual culture, of queer ways of life and the specialized knowledges they foster. Second, it examines the queer potential of literary and cultural transmission, the queerness that is sheltered within tradition. By exploring how these two senses are intertwined, it builds a persuasive argument for the relevance of queer criticism to literary study. Its detailed attention to works by Plato, Shakespeare, Swinburne, Pater, Wilde, James, and Faulkner seeks to formulate a practice of reading adequate to the queerness Ohi’s book uncovers within the literary tradition. Ohi identifies a radical new future for both queer theory and close reading: the possibility that each might exceed itself in merging with the other, creating a queer theory of literary tradition immanent in an immersed practice of reading.Less

Ecology without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World

Christine L. Marran

In Ecology without Culture, Christine L. Marran introduces biotropes—material and semiotic figures that exist for human perception—to navigate how and why the material world has proven to be an ... More

In Ecology without Culture, Christine L. Marran introduces biotropes—material and semiotic figures that exist for human perception—to navigate how and why the material world has proven to be an effective medium for representing culture. A bold and timely reconsideration of ecocriticism, this book insists on decentering questions of culture to highlight the materiality of poetry, film, and prose fiction.Less

An Errant Eye: Poetry and Topography in Early Modern France

Tom Conley

This book studies how topography, the art of describing local space and place, developed literary and visual form in early modern France. Arguing for a “new poetics of space” ranging throughout ... More

This book studies how topography, the art of describing local space and place, developed literary and visual form in early modern France. Arguing for a “new poetics of space” ranging throughout French Renaissance poetry, prose, and cartography, this book performs dazzling readings of maps, woodcuts, and poems to plot a topographical shift in the late Renaissance in which space, subjectivity, and politics fall into crisis. It charts the paradox of a period whose demarcation of national space through cartography is rendered unstable by an ambient world of printed writing. This tension, the book demonstrates, cuts through literature and graphic matter of various shapes and forms—hybrid genres that include the comic novel, the emblem-book, the eclogue, sonnets, and the personal essay. The book differs from historical treatments of spatial invention through the book’s argument that the topographic sensibility is one in which the ocular faculty, vital to the description of locale, is endowed with tact and touch.Less

The Essential Ellen Willis

Ellen Willis

Nona Willis Aronowitz (ed.)

This book gathers writings that span forty years and are both deeply engaged with the times in which they were first published and yet remain fresh and relevant amid today’s seemingly intractable ... More

This book gathers writings that span forty years and are both deeply engaged with the times in which they were first published and yet remain fresh and relevant amid today’s seemingly intractable political and cultural battles. Whether addressing the women’s movement, sex and abortion, race and class, or war and terrorism, this book brings to each a distinctive attitude—passionate yet ironic, clear-sighted yet hopeful. Offering a compelling and cohesive narrative of liberationist “transcendence politics,” the chapters here are organized by decade from the 1960s to the 2000s.Less

Filipino Crosscurrents: Oceanographies of Seafaring, Masculinities, and Globalization

Kale Bantigue Fajardo

Filipino seamen currently compose approximately twenty percent of the 1.2 million international maritime transportation workers. Ninety percent of the world’s goods and commodities are transported by ... More

Filipino seamen currently compose approximately twenty percent of the 1.2 million international maritime transportation workers. Ninety percent of the world’s goods and commodities are transported by ship. Taken together, these statistics attest to the critical role Filipino seamen play in worldwide maritime trade. This book examines the cultural politics of seafaring, Filipino maritime masculinities, and globalization in the Philippines and the Filipino diaspora. Drawing on fieldwork conducted on ships and in the ports of Manila and Oakland, as well as on an industrial container ship that traveled across the Pacific, the book argues that Filipino seamen have become key figures through which the Philippine state and economic elites promote Filipino masculinity and neoliberal globalization. From government officials to working-class seamen and seafarers’ advocates, this book’s analysis exposes the gaps in dominant narratives of Filipino seamen in national, regional, and global contexts.Less

Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children's Literature

Kenneth B. Kidd

Children’s literature has spent decades on the psychiatrist’s couch, submitting to psychoanalysis by scores of scholars and popular writers alike. This book turns the tables, suggesting that ... More

Children’s literature has spent decades on the psychiatrist’s couch, submitting to psychoanalysis by scores of scholars and popular writers alike. This book turns the tables, suggesting that psychoanalysts owe a significant and largely unacknowledged debt to books ostensibly written for children. In fact, the text argues, children’s literature and psychoanalysis have influenced and interacted with each other since Freud published his first case studies. This book shows how psychoanalysis developed in part through its engagement with children’s literature, which it used to articulate and dramatize its themes and methods, turning first to folklore and fairy tales, then to materials from psychoanalysis of children, and thence to children’s literary texts, especially such classic fantasies as Peter Pan and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It traces how children’s literature, and critical response to it, aided the popularization of psychoanalytic theory. With increasing acceptance of psychoanalysis came two new genres of children’s literature—known today as picture books and young adult novels—that were frequently fashioned as psychological in their forms and functions.Less

Henry James and the Queerness of Style

Kevin Ohi

This book begins with the proposition that to read Henry James—particularly the late texts—is to confront the queer potential of style and the traces it leaves on the literary life. In contrast to ... More

This book begins with the proposition that to read Henry James—particularly the late texts—is to confront the queer potential of style and the traces it leaves on the literary life. In contrast to other recent analyses, this book asserts that James’s queerness is to be found neither in the homoerotic thematics of the texts, however startlingly explicit, nor in the suggestions of same-sex desire in the author’s biography, however undeniable, but in his style. There are many elements in the style that make James’s writing queer. But if there is a thematic marker, the book shows, it is belatedness. The recurrent concern with belatedness, the book explains, should be understood not psychologically but stylistically, not as confessing the sad predicament of being out of sync with one’s life but as revealing the consequences of style’s refashioning of experience. Belatedness marks life’s encounter with style, and it describes an experience not of deprivation but of the rich potentiality of the literary work that James calls “freedom.” In this book’s reading, belatedness is the indicator not of sublimation or repression, nor of authorial self-sacrifice, but of the potentiality of the literary—and hence of the queerness of style.Less

Illegal Literature: Toward a Disruptive Creativity

David S. Roh

What is the cultural value of illegal works that violate the copyrights of popular fiction? Why do they persist despite clear, stringent intellectual property laws? Drawing upon the disciplines of ... More

What is the cultural value of illegal works that violate the copyrights of popular fiction? Why do they persist despite clear, stringent intellectual property laws? Drawing upon the disciplines of new media, law, and literary studies, Illegal Literature argues that recent emergence of “extralegal” works--texts often representative of subcultural elements--function as a crucial part of a system designed to spur the evolution of culture. Over the course of four chapters, this book: reconsiders subcultural voices relegated to the periphery in cultural studies, and articulates the need for considering how infrastructure--in the form of legal policy and network distribution--slows or accelerates the rate of cultural change; analyzes the relationship between intellectual property rights and American literature in two recent copyright disputes; compares American fan fiction and Japanese dōjinshi to illustrate how infrastructure and legal climates, dependent on copyright policy and distribution methods, detracts from or encourages fledgling creativity; and draws a connection between open source software programming and literary development. In a media ecology inundated by unauthorized materials, Illegal Literature argues that the proliferation of unsanctioned texts may actually benefit the literary and cultural development. This book addresses audiences from popular cultural studies, legal studies, literary studies, and new media studies.Less

In Babel's Shadow: Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States

Brian Lennon

Multilingual literature defies simple translation. Beginning with this insight, this book examines the resistance multilingual literature offers to book publication itself. In readings of G. V. ... More

Multilingual literature defies simple translation. Beginning with this insight, this book examines the resistance multilingual literature offers to book publication itself. In readings of G. V. Desani’s All about H. Hatterr, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Christine Brooke-Rose’s Between, Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation, Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Mutterzunge, and Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, among other works, this book shows how nationalized literary print culture inverts the values of a transnational age, reminding us that works of literature are, above all, objects in motion. Looking closely at the limit of both multilingual literary expression and the literary journalism, criticism, and scholarship that comments on multilingual work, this book presents a critical reflection on the fate of literature in a world gripped by the crisis of globalization.Less

Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics

Christopher Breu

This book engages with recent theories of materiality and biopolitics to provide a radical reinterpretation of experimental fiction in the second half of the twentieth century. In contrast to ... More

This book engages with recent theories of materiality and biopolitics to provide a radical reinterpretation of experimental fiction in the second half of the twentieth century. In contrast to readings that emphasize the metafictional qualities of these works, this book examines this literature’s focus on the material conditions of everyday life, from the body to built environments, and from ecosystems to economic production. The book rethinks contemporary understandings of biopolitics, affirming the importance of forms of materiality that refuse full socialization and resist symbolic manipulation. The text considers a range of novels that reflect questions of materiality in a biopolitical era, including William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, Thomas Pynchon’s V., J. G. Ballard’s Crash, Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. Drawing from accounts of the emergence of immaterial production and biopolitics by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, this book reveals the confrontational dimensions of materiality itself in a world devoted to the idea of its easy malleability and transcendence.Less

A Literature of Questions: Nonfiction for the Critical Child

Joe Sutliff Sanders

The first book to theorize children’s nonfiction from a literary perspective, A Literature of Questions explains how the genre speaks in unique ways to its young readers, inviting them to the project ... More

The first book to theorize children’s nonfiction from a literary perspective, A Literature of Questions explains how the genre speaks in unique ways to its young readers, inviting them to the project of understanding. It lays out a series of techniques for analysis, then applies and nuances through extensive close readings and case studies of books from the past half century.Less