Bloomsbury Literary Studies

New Releases: May 2016

May is shaping up to be an exciting month for Bloomsbury Lit—we have an incredible range of new titles coming out on subjects including Kerouac’s poetics, the future of literary theory, and reagency in the contemporary American novel. Take a look at some of our new titles below:

 

In Subject of the Event: Reagency in the American Novel after 2000, Sebastian Huber examines the conception of events and subjects in five contemporary American novels: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Jess Walter’s The Zero, Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions, Paul Beatty’s Slumberland and Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day.

 

 

Visualizing Jewish Narrative: Jewish Comics and Graphic Novels explores Jewish comics creators’ tackling of themes such as Jewish identity, the Holocaust and the Israel/Palestine conflict, with chapters by leading and emerging scholars in contemporary comic book studies.

 

 

Hassan Melehy’s Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory offers a reassessment of Jack Kerouac’s poetic theory and practice from the perspective of their central yet most overlooked component: the fact that he thought and worked in two languages, his native French and his adopted English. If you’re in New York, stop by the Kerouac book launch on May 20^th at KGB bar—details here.

 

Macbeth, Macbeth is an unprecedented collaboration between two leading Shakespeareans – with commentary throughout on the narrative's sources and the process of adaptation, this critical reimagining of Shakespeare's Macbeth opens up vivid new insights into one of the most familiar plays in the literary canon.

 

 

In Dead Theory: Derrida, Death, and the Afterlife of Theory, leading scholars explore the afterlives of Theory following the deaths of its first generations of thinkers and its legacies for contemporary criticism.

 

 

 

British Fictions of the Sixties: The Making of the Swinging Decade charts how the dramatic socio-political changes that marked the decade impacted on the development of fiction during the 1960s.

The Uncanny Power and Artistry of Biofiction

Guest post by Michael Lackey

The Danish painter Einar Wegener had an elective surgery in 1930 to become the woman Lili Elbe.  At first glance, David Ebershoff’s novel The Danish Girl is about this transformation.  But if one understands how the biographical novel converts an historical figure into a literary symbol, then one can see how The Danish Girl actually illuminates more than just the “life” of the first person to have a sex-reassignment surgery.  It illuminates some of the most important ideas and experiences about sex and gender identity in the contemporary world.

The biographical novel, a work of fiction that names its protagonist after an actual historical figure, has become a dominant literary form in recent years.  But why?  This is the question I sought to answer when I interviewed prominent biographical novelists for my book Truthful Fictions, and my new book The American Biographical Novel contains the results of my four years of research. 

One could wrongly assume that readers get an accurate version of an actual historical figure in a biographical novel, but Lance Olsen illustrates why this is not and cannot be the case.  For a long time, historians and scholars believed that Hitler and the Nazis adopted and made use of the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche.  But Nietzsche explicitly and unambiguously opposed core Nazi ideas, such as nationalism and anti-Semitism.  So how could the Nazis appropriate him and his work?  In Nietzsche’s Kisses, Olsen answers this question by picturing how Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth, converted the paper person of Friedrich Nietzsche into her husband, Bernhard Förster.  In essence, to advance their political agenda, the Nazis adopted and used, not the ideas and person of Friedrich Nietzsche, but Elisabeth’s Försterized version of her brother, a figure that is almost the complete opposite of Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s Kisses is vintage biofiction because, while it is about an actual historical figure, it is also about so much more.    

To put the matter simply, biographical novelists are different from biographers, because they are more committed to the sacred art of imaginative creation than biographical representation.  Thus, they take unapologetic liberties with the life of their subject in order to communicate their own vision of life.  For instance, Barbara Chase-Riboud authored a powerful biographical novel about Sally Hemings, the slave-“wife” of Thomas Jefferson.  Jefferson was forty-five and Hemings was fifteen when they first became romantically involved, and Jefferson fathered at least seven children with her.  Chase-Riboud found something historically, politically, and intellectually significant in this story, so she invented a wide range of characters and scenes in order to clarify how Jefferson could promote a philosophy of life and liberty for all, but simultaneously enslave his own children.  So while Chase-Riboud creatively imagines the “life of Hemings,” she actually uses Hemings to expose a contradiction at the core of American democracy, a contradiction that originated with Jefferson but persists even to today. 

Only now are we starting to understand the uncanny power of the biographical novel.  This is a form of fiction that tells us as much about someone from the past as it does about who we are and how we came to be in the present. 

There is still a lot of work to do in order to understand and appreciate the biographical novel.  Fortunately, this is the ideal time to do this work, since there are now so many brilliant biographical novels out there.

 

Michael Lackey is Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, USA. His books include The Modernist God State, Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists and The American Biographical Novel, all available from Bloomsbury.

 

 

Special offer! Buy both Truthful Fictions and The American Biographical Novel and get 35% off, now through May 31st! Check out both books here.

On Writing a Guide to Poetry (Part II)

Guest Post by Mark Yakich

What is one to think of the following picture?

Is it a bit shocking? A bit adorable? Is it shockingly adorable? Whatever it is, it is the image I had initially envisioned for my book’s cover. As someone who’s been interested in design and art for a long time, I’d even made mock-up:

I’d found the image of the dead baby deer by chance on Flickr, and felt immediately that it captured a certain feeling that I have about poetry—that beauty is sometimes best displayed in the ostensibly sorrowful or awful. It’s an overly sentimental notion, perhaps, and one I associate with a famous line from Rilke’s Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies): Denn das Schöne ist nichts / als des Schrecklichen Anfang... (For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of a terror…).

As my book’s title employs the words “survivor” and “guide,” the image also brought forth the idea of the book as being somehow helpful when entering dark woods. I liked that notion both literally—one might take the book on a hike or a camping trip—and figuratively, in the sense of reading and writing a poem as an adventure into an unknown territory.

Apparently, however, the art director or designer had other ideas, most of them involving the vanishing point of a road or highway with something askew:

In the end, I am pleased with the cover we finally settled on:

And as an object, the book itself is lovely. The Rilkean aspect of the cover, for me, does not reside in the red-orange emergency cones. Rather, it’s what those cones point to: the word “poetry” and the misty white space intimating oblivion—an unknown beyond both dark woods and dark words.

 

Mark Yakich is Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA, Editor of New Orleans Review, and a poet and novelist. He is the author of Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross (2004), The Making of Collateral Beauty (2006), and The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine (2008). His latest book, Poetry: A Survivor's Guide, is now available from Bloomsbury.

On Writing a Guide to Poetry (Part I)

Guest Post by Mark Yakich

I’d wanted to call my book Poetry: A Guide for the Perplexed—not only because Bloomsbury has a series called “Guides for the Perplexed,” riffing off Maimonides’ 12th-century The Guide for the Perplexed, but because so many poems leave so many readers nonplussed—myself included.

I am not someone who devoured books as a child. In fact, I disliked books, did not enjoy reading, and found poetry to be especially irrelevant to my life...all the way up until my late twenties. But that’s not exactly why I first began writing Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide—as a means of getting people interested in poems. I wrote it chiefly for my students.

To be frank, over fifteen years of teaching poetry I’d gotten tired of repeating myself. For example, whenever my students and I would investigate certain figurative language, a question would invariably arise: What’s the difference between a metaphor and a simile? Someone would provide this answer: “A metaphor is a comparison between two unlike things. And a simile is a comparison that uses like or as.” I’d been taught this same reply in formative schooling and had learned nothing from it besides that it was a definition to memorize for a quiz. That is, simply identifying a metaphor or a simile helped me not one bit in understanding a poem. So, as a teacher of poems now, I ask a follow-up question: So why use a simile instead of a metaphor? If there’s an answer from a student, more often than not, it is: “Hell if I know.”

Here is where I employ one of my bromides:

Set aside the definitions you were given long ago, and think of a metaphor as a substitution, as in an equation: Bill is a bear this morning. In mathematical terms, “is” is “equals.” So: Bill = bear. But a simile functions a little differently. Bill is like a bear this morning. Bill ≃ bear. The substitution, or the transference, isn’t a full one.

While it may take another example or two to get across the notion of metaphor as nothing more than substitution (metaphor doesn’t necessarily have to compare “two unlike things”), students will begin to engage poetry from an angle they are unaccustomed to.

And as soon as they think they have a handle on it, I might offer the following:

If one accepts that metaphor is substitution, then what is one to do with T. S. Eliot’s proposition that “Nothing in this world or the next is a substitute for anything else”? Metaphor, that is, becomes only a pseudo-substitution. Even two identical eggs aren’t actually identical: one sits next to the other in the carton and they can be switched around, but the one is never materially the other. Metaphor is a kind of necessary deception that we accept mostly unthinkingly.

And that is precisely what reading and writing poems can help us avoid: going throughout our daily business without thinking. Because after I collected all these little strategies and personal bromides about reading and writing poems, I realized that the book I wrote wasn’t only about how to view poetry, but how to view day-to-day living. And last year while on sabbatical (away from teaching) I was able to explore and hone these thoughts into a book—a book I wish I’d had long ago when I had my first (dis)taste of poetry.

 

Visit our blog next Tuesday for Part II 

Mark Yakich is Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA, Editor of New Orleans Review, and a poet and novelist. He is the author of Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross (2004), The Making of Collateral Beauty (2006), and The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine (2008). His latest book, Poetry: A Survivor's Guide, is now available from Bloomsbury.

On Silence by John Biguenet

From Surrounded by Souvenirs of Life: A Conversation with John Biguenet by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais (The Los Angeles Review of Books, November 3, 2015)

 

How long have you wanted to write about silence? What drew you to the subject?

When I was approached by the publisher and asked if I would write a volume in its Object Lessons series, silence was the first subject I proposed. A writer spends so much of his or her life in silence, composing and reading, that it seemed an object with which I was very familiar.

Silence, in about one hundred pages (not counting notes or bibliography), delves into a wide range of topics and references — from Twain, Poe, Foucault, Kafka, and Chekhov to solitary confinement, luxury goods and experiences, sensory deprivation, punctuation, Edward Snowden’s leaks, and the Afghan practice of raising a girl as a boy when a family has no son. You also balance the personal, political, and philosophical. Is that what you were trying to do?

I wanted to create something that would mirror the life of the mind — integrating information, the testimony of others, personal experience, and then doubt about the conclusions reached. Someone has written that Silence reads like a novel. If that’s true, I would be very pleased.

One of the fascinating things about this book and about the series Object Lessons as a whole is its open-ended yet confining nature. While its topics are enormous and wide-ranging (and about things most people casually assume they understand), the short form requires the author to make difficult decisions about how to approach these subjects. Silence could have taken endless shapes. What ideas or examples did you immediately know you wanted to include? What did the short form force you to exclude? What did you wish that you’d had more room to explore?

The first paragraph of the book is about silence, but it might as well be about silence as a subject for study:

We may conjecture that somewhere in the cosmos, beyond the border of all human trace, a zone of silence awaits (always receding, of course, before the advance of future explorers), a great sea of stillness unperturbed by the animate, an utterly quiet virgin territory. But our imagination misleads us if we conceive of silence as a destination at which we might arrive.

The boundary of the subject, too, always recedes before our efforts to reach its frontiers. The deeper I descended into silence, so to speak, the more the subject expanded until there were few aspects of life that didn’t seem to depend, in some sense, on silence. I knew, for example, that I would have to address the relationship of silence to power and to religion. I could not have guessed, though, that I would write a chapter on the silence of dolls. I expected to write about torture as the antidote of silence: “For what is the purpose of torture … is it not to force stubborn silence into speech?” But I was surprised by my argument that the camera is, fundamentally, a silencer. On the other hand, I anticipated writing about the erotics of silence — examining, for example, “Murke’s Collected Silences” by Heinrich Böll in which a man records the enforced silences of “a very pretty blonde” so that he can listen to the tape in the evenings when he is alone. But the contractual word limit of my book silenced me before I could speak of such things.

 

John Biguenet is Robert Hunter Distinguished University Professor at Loyola University, New Orleans, USA. His publications include Oyster (2002), The Torturer’s Apprentice: Stories (2001), Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida (co-editor with Rainer Schulte, 1992), and Foreign Fictions (1978). He served as the first guest columnist of The New York Times (2005-2006). His latest book, Silence, is part of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series.

Black Comics Wins Eisner Award

Congratulations to Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation edited by Sheena C. Howard and Ronald L. Jackson II for winning the Will Eisner Comic Industry Award for Best Scholarly/Academic Work over the weekend at San Diego Comic-Con!  The Eisner awards, according the website are “considered the ‘Oscars’ of the comic book industry.”  More information and the full listing of winners are here.


Check out more information on Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation.

Book Launch and Poetry Reading for The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry

BOOK LAUNCH AND POETRY READING:  Anthology of Jewish American Poets

Saturday, Oct. 26, 2013, 8:00 p.m.

Oseh Shalom Congregation, 7515 Olive Branch Way, Laurel, MD. http://www.oseh-shalom.org/

Reading by poets featured in the just-released The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry: Deborah Ager (co-editor), Nancy Naomi Carlson, Rachel Malis, Yvette Neisser Moreno, and Pia Taavila-Borsheim. Followed by wine and cheese reception. Free and open to the public.

Nancy Naomi Carlson, Ph.D., is an associate editor for Tupelo Press and Translations Editor for Tupelo Quarterly. Nominated five times for a Pushcart Prize, she has published two award-winning chapbooks, as well as Kings Highway and a book of translations, Stone Lyre: Poems of Rene Char. Her work has appeared in print over 200 times, including such journals as AGNI, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Phoebe, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, and is forthcoming in The Georgia Review. She is a recipient of grants from the NEA, the Maryland Arts Council, and the Montgomery County Arts and Humanities Council.

Rachel Malis earned her MFA from ASU in 2010. Rachel has been published in Oberon Poetry, Modoc Forum, Willows Wept Review, Damselfly Press and the New Mexico Poetry Review. She currently lives in Washington, DC, where she is working on a novel.

Deborah Ager is an author, editor of books, and founder of a magazine. She’s author of Midnight Voices (2009) and co-editor of The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry (2013) and Old Flame: Ten Years of 32 Poems Magazine (2012). Ager is a founding board member of 32 Poems Magazine, on the editorial board of Redux and a director of the Miller Cabin Poetry Reading Series in Washington, DC. Find out more: http://www.deborahager.com.

Yvette Neisser Moreno is the author of Grip, winner of the 2011 Gival Press Poetry Award, and an avid translator of Spanish poetry. Her poems, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared in such publications as Foreign Policy in Focus, Palestine-Israel Journal, and Virginia Quarterly Review. In addition to her day job, she coordinates the DC-Area Literary Translators Network (DC-ALT), serves on Split This Rock’s Program Committee, and teaches at The Writer’s Center. Her website is: www.yneissermoreno.com

Pia Taavila-Borsheim, Ph.D., is the author of Moon on the Meadow (Gallaudet University Press, 2008) and Two Winters (Finishing Line Press 2011). She is Professor of English at Gallaudet, teaching classes in literature and creative writing.

Start reading The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry below

Call for Proposals - New Horizons for Contemporary Writing

Bloomsbury are very excited to be announcing the launch of a brand new series on contemporary literature, edited by Peter Boxall (University of Sussex), Stephen J. Burn (University of Glasgow) and Bryan Cheyette (University of Reading).

Call for Proposals

The editors invite proposals for a new series of research monographs (typically 90,000 words long) to be published by Bloomsbury. The series — New Horizons for Contemporary Writing — will promote innovative scholarly works that set out new critical models, and respond to the range of emerging literary possibilities. As the reigning literary critical paradigms of the last few decades have entered a period of fertile redefinition, titles in this series will map out alternative intellectual frameworks and explore the possibility of a more supple interdisciplinarity that connects new theoretical developments to contemporary literature’s own innovations.

Possible subjects include:

• World Literature;
• Legacies of Theory;
• Post-feminism;
• Human, animal, machine;
• The return of the real;
• History, memory and temporality;
• Science and the humanities;
• Contemporary literature after postmodernism and/or postcolonialism;
• Contemporary formations of the body;
• Translation in a transcultural context;
• Fictions of democracy;
• The future of the novel;  
• Visuality and narrative;
• Newness in a global age;
• Post-ethnicity;
• Voice, ventriloquism, and mutism.

Questions, proposals, and expressions of interest should be sent to: [email protected]

For consideration as part of the first tranche of publications, please send proposals by 1 February 2014.

And keep an eye on this site for news of the first titles very soon.

Comparative Literature Roundup

Bloomsbury Literary Studies has been busy in 2013 – check out these recent additions to our comparative literature list!

In The Book of Imitation and Desire: Reading Milan Kundera with René Girard Trevor Cribben Merrill offers a bold reassessment of Milan Kundera’s place in the contemporary canon. Building on theorist René Girard’s notion of “triangular desire,” he shows that modern classics such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting display a counterintuitive—and bitterly funny—understanding of human attraction.

“The contribution that Trevor Merrill’s book makes is at least threefold : it sheds new light on the work of one of our era’s strongest novelists; it extends and confirms the literary reach of René Girard’s main hypotheses; and it helps us to better understand our own existence. And it does all of this in a style that’s clear, precise, and elegant. What more could be asked of a major work of literary criticism?”
–  François Ricard, McGill University, Canada

Price: £60.00 / $110.00


If the September 11 terror attacks opened up an era of crises and exceptions of which we are yet to see the end, it is perhaps not surprising that care has emerged in the early twenty-first century as a key political issue. Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel approaches contemporary narratives of care, such as J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions, and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, through the lens of a growing body of theoretical writings on biopolitics.

“Novels govern our lives: Narrative Care allows us to understand this statement literally. Should we try to escape the biopolitical scene of literature? Would that cure our political wounds? Arne De Boever offers an alternative solution: to subtract the emancipatory practice of care from its biopolitical appropriation. This solution implies that we think the relations between the novel, aesthetics, and politics anew. It's rare to see a literary critic take such good care of philosophy.”
–  Frédéric Neyrat, Philosopher and Visiting Scholar in the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA

Price: £55.00 / $100.00


Romancing Fascism argues that intellectual responsibility can only be safeguarded if criticism is mobilised both as a poetic and as a critically enlightened endeavour. In this analysis of allegory as a function of modernity, what is made clear is the difficulty, if not impossibility, of definitively determining the genealogical antecedents of intellectual trends, particularly those considered pernicious to clear thinking.

“Kath Kerr-Koch’s thoroughly researched and densely argued study analyses the uses of allegory in these three (apparently) disparate writers. Kerr-Koch boldly attempts the rehabilitation of de Man, so drastically fallen from critical-theoretical favour, in the context of an examination of the positive resistant potential of allegory in the contemporary world.”
–  Patrick Williams, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies, Nottingham Trent University, UK

Price: £60.00 / $110.00


Finally, Thomas Mann in English: A Study in Literary Translation is the most recent volume in our New Directions in German Studies series, a forum for the publication of new works in all areas of German Studies (German, Austrian, and Swiss literature, culture, and cinema from any period). David Horton provides a new insight into the ways in which one of Europe's major twentieth-century authors has been imported into English. This book provides the first systematic exploration of the English versions, illustrating the vicissitudes of literary translation through a principled discussion of a major author.

“Anyone interested in Mann and the literary and linguistic aspects of the transformation a text undergoes in the process of translation will profit from this meticulously argued study.”
–  Jens Rieckmann, Emeritus Professor of German, University of California, Irvine, USA

Price: £60.00 / $110.00


For those of you interested in keeping up to date on the latest scholarship in Comparative Literature, find these titles and more on offer at our website.

Guest Post: The Textual Life of Airports author Chris Schaberg on the New Paperback Edition

My book The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight is now out in paperback, beautifully rebranded under the Bloomsbury imprint, and there have been some nice reviews to coincide with the release of the new affordable edition. In a few cases, readers have sent me photos of the book being read at the airport—minor instances of mise en abyme that invariably make my day.

 

photo by Bobby Schweizer

Nathan Martin, savvy book guru in New Orleans who runs a literary blog called Room 220, made the insightful comment in his review that, “By the end of the book, although it was very clear that airports fascinate Schaberg, it remained ambiguous to me whether he likes them.” This key ambiguity both propels the momentum of the book and perhaps makes it a bit slippery from time to time. My strong ambivalence concerning airports is now driving a follow up study that I’m tentatively calling “The End of Airports”—this might be a cautionary tale or a celebration, I’m not yet sure.

Another reader, in preparation for her own travel adventures, read my book in tandem with Alain de Botton's much more pithy title A Week at the Airport (a book that I in turn take up in one of my chapters). This reader estimated The Textual Life of Airports “A noble exercise, but his thesis is a bit confused, and by the end of the book I still wasn't quite sure what he was trying to get at.” I can commiserate with this reader: even as I was writing the book I myself was not always sure what I was getting at—so I’ll be the first to admit that the book can feel non-thetic at times.

Yet there are indeed small arguments that inflect and build on one another throughout the book, accumulating in the weird jumble that I call the “textual life of airports.” I recently reviewed an excellent book by the geographer Peter Adey called Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects—and as you can see from the title, Adey takes up the ‘life’ of air travel in his own fascinating ways, making his book a great companion text to mine. But back to the reading pilgrim in the previous paragraph, I love that someone sought my book as a way to prepare to inhabit airports, and I hope that some of my confusions sink in and gain purchase as she continues to find herself in odd airport spaces. I imagine everyday travelers picking up my book at airport bookstores, even as this might mean spreading confusion concerning airports—spawning a host of puzzled travelers, as it were.

In fact, an alternative title for my book could have been “Airport Confusions.” It’s a book about how airports confuse their subjects, and about how confusing it can be to really think about airports. In a very plain way, airports are confused spaces, neither totally here nor decidedly there, but always somewhere in between.

And confusion can be a good thing—I tell this to my students all the time. We have plenty of places to turn for quick and easy answers; just ask Siri to define “airport” to sidestep the rugged path of confusion.

As for me, I think it’s a false choice, and that the seemingly direct route leads us right back to the labyrinthine concourses of the ordinary airport, resplendent with all those feelings, actions, and sensations that continue to boggle our minds, lose our bags, and grope our bodies. I’m more confused about airports than ever, and I rather like it this way. It’s a strange feeling to have written a book about something and then to feel like I have fewer certain things to say about the topic than before I set out. But it keeps me thinking, reading, writing, and, curious as ever, wandering around actual airports.

You can follow Christopher Schaberg on twitter at @airplanereading