Bloomsbury Literary Studies

Silencing Women

An excerpt from the Object Lessons book Silence by John Biguenet

In our first visit to Florence, while still students, my wife and I found a little restaurant near our bat-infested pensione as sunset turned the Arno bronze. Having been raised by her grandmother from Viareggio, the nearby beach resort, Marsha ordered our meal in an Italian our old waiter would have recognized as native to Tuscany. He, however, refused to write anything on his pad until impatiently interrupting her with a stern “Signorina!” he turned to me inquisitively. Only after I nodded did he scribble down our order.

Later, trying to master the craft of teaching, I read an article about the tendency of both male and female teachers to interrupt female—but not male—students when answering questions. Of course, I thought myself exempt from such sexism until I began to make an effort to restrain myself from interrupting students. It quickly became obvious to me that I had to remind myself to allow the student to complete an answer when that student was a woman but I had few occasions to practice such restraint when a man was speaking in the class. I found myself rarely on the verge of interruption if the student was male.

There was little comfort to be drawn from the research that indicated I would have been just as likely to interrupt a female student if I had been female myself. I found even more troubling than this revelation about my teaching the recognition that my female students had endured an education their whole lives in which instructors cut short their insights while their male classmates were accorded full attention. It’s impossible to believe that such behavior by teachers and other respected authority figures would not have lifelong consequences for those silenced through interruptions as well as through less obvious pressures to defer to the judgments of male counterparts.

We live in a world where women are often silenced, sometimes violently. But the daily indignity of being casually silenced is so much a part of a woman’s experience that such less dramatic instances of the imposition of silence on another human being, as a waiter’s or a teacher’s curt interruption, may actually illuminate more fully than draconian examples the role of silence in maintaining existing distributions of power in society. Silenced myself by the limitations a small book imposes upon its author, I offer only a single example, though volumes remain to be written about the silencing not only of women but of all those marginalized by the speech of the powerful.

Bessie Dendrinos and Emilia Ribeiro Pedro demonstrate how much is to be gleaned from analysis of an easily overlooked silencing of women in daily life: the giving of street directions.¹ In their review of the literature about silence and gender, the researchers reference an earlier study whose author “presents data which show how men exercised power in their daily communicative encounters with their female partners by being silent. The relatively silent behavior of husbands tended to silence their wives, who thus worked harder to maintain the interaction but whose efforts were confounded by their partners’ frequent ‘no-response’ turn-taking violations.” Dendrinos and Pedro note both that “Power is routinely exercised through speech” and that “Power . . . may also be exercised through silence.”

At the highest levels of authority, the latter may be preferred. In Le Fil de l’épée, his 1932 meditation on leadership, Charles de Gaulle writes, “Rien ne rehausse l’autorité mieux que le silence, splendeur des forts et refuge des faibles.” His perhaps surprising insight loses little in translation: “Nothing enhances authority better than silence, splendor of the strong and refuge of the weak.”² But de Gaulle goes further: “Silence is the ultimate weapon of power.”³ Part of his meaning surely lies in George Bernard Shaw’s line in Back to Methuselah (1921) that “Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.”⁴ But more than that, the questions of the powerless, the demands of the dispossessed, can be ignored by the powerful with impunity. Leonardo da Vinci agrees: “Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.”⁵ (Of course, one could read that to mean that the silence of the ruled strengthens the ruler. On the other hand, da Vinci, always at the mercy of powerful patrons, was well acquainted with agonizingly long waits for a ruler to break his silence and authorize a new commission.)

In giving street directions, though, he who speaks seems to assert authority. The researchers based their conclusions on thirty-four random instances of a female asking for directions from various groups in cities and smaller towns in Portugal and Greece; they found no significant differences in the responses elicited in the two countries.

Some interesting gender-specific details emerged. When women couldn’t provide directions, they apologized; men didn’t. Women used “will” in giving directions; men used “must.” Men also tended to use repetition. But the role of silence in giving directions was the element most clearly gender specific.

For example, in the few instances in which a pair of women were asked for directions, “the role of informant seemed to be negotiated” by eye contact. Groups of men, on the other hand, spoke over one another until one emerged to give directions. But in nearly all mixed-sex groups, “it was the males that ultimately assumed the role of informant.” The women present were either silent throughout or silenced. When women began to provide directions, they eventually “gave up their role as informants. In only one encounter, when the man had completed his turn, the woman confirmed what her companion had said, and repeated his last utterance verbatim.” In other encounters, females who could have corrected the inaccurate directions provided by a male either remained silent or, rather than directly correcting him, asked a question that would make him rethink the directions.

A particularly interesting exchange occurred when directions were asked of a small group of thirty- to forty- year-old men:

One of the men responded immediately and proceeded, without any interruption from the others, to give long and complicated directions. A woman in her twenties, coming out of a nearby bakery, heard the confusing explanation and intervened to help clarify the man’s account. But as soon as she began to talk, she was interrupted by the same man who had spoken and who now began to repeat what he had said before. The woman intervened again and was allowed to complete her turn of short and precise directions. At that moment, another man who had witnessed the whole incident took the floor and spoke in a loud and authoritative tone, as if to correct the female speaker. However, he simply paraphrased the information which had been provided by the woman.

In the only two instances in the research where women were allowed to provide directions, men still had the last word. The example that brought to mind our dinner in Florence nearly half a century ago involved another young couple. After the woman had offered her two sentences of simple directions, “her male companion looked at us and confirmed: ‘Sosta. That’s right.’”

The old waiter who upbraided Marsha that summer evening long ago would have approved of the young man.

NOTES

1  Bessie Dendrinos and Emilia Ribeiro Pedro, “Giving
Street Directions: The Silent Role of Women,” in Silence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Adam Jaworski (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997), 215–38. All related quotes are from this source. 


2  http://evene.lefigaro.fr/citation/rien-rehausse-autorite-mieux- silence-splendeur-forts-refuge-fai-41364.php.

3  http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/490153.Charles_de_ Gaulle.

4  http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/30170.html.

5  http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/13560.Leonardo_ 
da_Vinci. 


John Biguenet is Robert Hunter Distinguished University Professor at Loyola University, New Orleans, USA. His publications include The Rising Water Trilogy: Plays (2015), Oyster (2002), The Torturer’s Apprentice: Stories (2001), The Craft of Translation (co-editor with Rainer Schulte, 1989), Foreign Fictions (1978), and four other books. His seventh play, Ever After, will be featured at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater’s PlayFest 2016.  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.

Learn more about Silence and our Object Lessons series at Bloomsbury.com

 

Q&A with Michael Richardson

Michael Richardson answered a few questions for us about his new book, Gestures of Testimony: Torture, Trauma, and Affect in Literature.

How would you describe your book in one sentence?

Gestures of Testimony argues that writing torture and its traumas in fiction requires re-thinking the relationship between state power, tortured and torturing bodies, and literary witnessing.

What drew to you writing about this subject?

When President Obama was elected in 2008, he immediately declassified additional Torture Memos and associated documents. What they described was shocking and intensely moving. The leaked report form International Committee for the Red Cross, for instance, had these incredibly powerful testimonies from detainees at CIA ‘black sites.’ But at the same time, it seemed to me that they told stories from within the confines of a particular genre: the human rights testimony. What would it take to tell those stories in other ways? What might fiction make possible that factual testimony did not?

How long have you been researching it? How did you come to study it?

Reading those memoranda, I was increasingly fascinated by the problem of how the events and experiences described in them could be account for in fiction. At the time, I was writing speeches for Jack Layton, then the leader of Canada’s NDP, so I was highly attuned to the relationship between writing and politics. But I decided what I was doing wasn’t enough about writing itself. That led me back to academia, and this book grew out of my doctoral work. All said, this book is six years in the making, so the ideas it develops are very lived in. I think that’s its greatest virtue: for all its intense and occasionally speculative theorizing, it is very grounded in practices of reading, thinking and writing.

What does your book focus on that hasn’t been explored elsewhere?

While there are many fine books on torture and even on its relationship to language, they tend to consider torture as an isolating, world-destroying experience. Without minimizing torture’s violence or the radical ways in which it disrupts experience, Gestures of Testimony argues that torture is always in relation to something else: a torturer, state power, an environment, or simply techniques and affects, such as shame, rage, and so on. This makes problematic the reflexive claim in trauma studies that its traumatic consequences are somehow ‘unrepresentable.’ Instead, it argues for an affective, gestural approach to writing torture and its traumas, one that embraces its corporeality and recognizes its complex, unstable and changeable relation to experience.

What initially drew you to Literary Studies?

Writing and imagining, more than anything. I’ve read voraciously since I was young, but I’ve also written for at least as long. For me, literary studies—and the humanities more generally, actually—is a kind of thinking through writing, a means of making sense of imagining in the context of texts, histories, and theories. My research tends to be interdisciplinary (and certainly this book is), so I’m also drawn to the willingness of literary studies to embrace ideas from elsewhere.

Which Bloomsbury Lit Studies books have you read? Which are your favorites, and why?

I’m very much enjoying the couple of books I’ve read in the new Object Lessons series, because they are so concise, personal and evocative. Another book that springs to mind right now is Anthony Uhlmann’s book Thinking in Literature, which does a very fine job of showing how literature can be philosophy.

 

Michael Richardson is Lecturer in the School of Arts & Media at the University of New South Wales, Australia.

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.

Environmental Cultures: Day 2

We spoke with author Serenella Iovino about her new book in the Environmental Cultures series, her research in ecocriticism, and Italy's place in the current eco-global debate:

What inspired you to write about Italy’s landscapes from an ecocritical point-of-view?

For better or for worse, Italy is every so often seen through the lens of clichés. But the truth is that Italy’s landscapes and “ecological bodies“ ooze stories that outflow these commonplace representations, and many of these stories deserve to be told. These are stories of ancient calamities and of their intermittent memory—as in the case of the volcanic eruption that erased Pompeii in 79 AD and that is still a subterranean threat today; stories of “maldevelopment“—as in the more recent instances of Venice/Marghera, Naples, or industrial Piedmont; stories in which environmental catastrophes occur within the context of corrupt politics—and here the earthquakes in Irpinia or L’Aquila are perfect examples. But there are also stories of resistance, transformation, and redemption coming from these and many other wounded places. The inspiration for this book came from the attempt to see how literary and artistic imagination could merge with the stories inscribed in Italy’s ecological bodies and landscapes taken as “material texts.” The idea was that this combination of narrative angles could liberate the eco-political “stories of resistance” dispersed on Italy’s body. It was not an easy task, but the methodological flexibility of ecocriticism and of the environmental humanities offered me a useful framework to capture this complexity.

Did anything surprise you as you were doing the research for this book? Did the work make you look at any of these landscapes in a new way?

The most surprising thing to me, while working at Ecocriticism and Italy, was to see the revelatory power of environmental stories. These stories can create coalitions, they can reinforce and recreate identities, helping people to see hidden connections across spaces and temporalities, and to reinforce their claims for justice.

Let me make one example. I live in the Cuneo area, the “most partisan“ province of Italy in the Resistance struggle against Nazi-Fascism. Today this landscape, a huge portion of which was declared a World Heritage site by Unesco in 2014, speaks of labor and beauty. It is the landscape of taste and “eco-gastronomy” in which Slow Food, now globally so popular, has its roots. However, as recently as twenty or twenty-five years ago, this was quite a depressed area, populated by poor peasants and exploited women and children. I believe that the reason of this renaissance is that those once “defeated“ people, who used to see themselves as if they were scattered leaves or pebbles, were solicited to tell their stories, and hence to become aware of themselves, of what they were and possessed. We owe all this mainly to Nuto Revelli (1919-2004), a former partisan chief, who, from the 1970s to the mid-1980s, collected several hundred testimonies and published them in two of his books, Il mondo dei vinti e L’anello forte. This oeuvre—one of Italy’s most significant archives of oral and environmental history—conveys the voices of these people and of these landscapes, and cannot be read if not through a constant reference to Piedmont’s “ecologies of resistance.” Slow Food, as a discourse of liberation, was enabled by this very vision. Writing Ecocriticism and Italy gave me the opportunity to see these connections and to consider these stories as symbolic of wider realities.

The cover of Ecocriticism and Italy is a photo of the Cretto di Gibellina installation by Alberto Burri – can you tell us about that and how it reflects the themes of your book?

Burri’s Cretto is a memorial artwork for the earthquake that destroyed a vast area of North-Western Sicily in 1968. Created by covering with a cast of concrete the ruins of Gibellina, it captures the voice of that hurt landscape, almost turning its silence into a rock-hard cry. This cry is the expression of an open wound, which involves both humans and the land. “Wound” is a recurring word in my book, and I will try to explain what I mean for this. In A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold wrote: “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” The problem with these wounds is that they might escape the eyes of most “ecologically unaware” people: “Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen,” Leopold observed. For an instinctive association of ideas, my mind recalls the title of an enigmatic and striking artwork by Joseph Beuys, Zeige deine Wunde, Show your Wound (1976). Beuys’s artwork was, significantly, conceived when the artist was living in Rome, experiencing there the turmoil and anxieties of Italy’s so-called “Years of Lead.” Even if Beuys’s creations usually have a personal background, there is in this work an outbreak of the impersonal. As he declared: “in this concert of objects, it is not I who speak; the things have their own inner language.” The wound to be exposed here is not that of an individual. It is an eminently political one. Show your wound / in a world of wounds: this synthesis means for me that exposing our pain, making it visible, is a move towards healing, and this is the only way to overcome the feeling of loneliness and frustration invoked by Leopold. The wounds we are talking about are the ones of the impersonal (lands, seas, cities, cells), but also the wounds that are transferred from the body of the world to our bodies, from the mind of living things to our mind, through that cognitive filter that Leopold calls “an ecological education.” Ecocriticism and Italy is both the exposition and the reading of a landscape of wounds. If a wound is the sign of violence or pain, showing it is a way to resist to such violence. Reading this wound and the bodies it affects, and interpreting all this as a complex of signs, is a practice of liberation.

Which is the role of the environmental humanities in the current eco-global debate and which is the contribution that a book on Italy can give to this discourse?

It has often been repeated that the industrial era has eventually ushered in a time called “Anthropocene,” a period in the earth’s history when the human has become a geological force. If the human is a geological force, then the Anthropocene “body politic” is not the same as it was before: it includes the built environment as well as forests, body cells as well as vegetation and fauna, domestic animals and melting glaciers; it entails issues of political freedoms and individual wellbeing, as well as energy democracy and global pollution. In the age of the Anthropocene, “body politic” is a collective of agents and of processes, themselves resulting from collective agencies and dynamics. It is the earth, in its geological, chemicals and biological cycles. The environmental humanities, as a wide and intersectional discourse, are the only approach able to describe and explain these phenomena; they provide the only suitable coordinates to sketching a map of the Anthropocene. Italy’s landscapes are a symbolic segment of the Anthropocene’s map. In their limited scope, they offer interesting access points to read these new post-geological landscapes on a vaster scale. This is why Ecocriticism and Italy is not just a book about Italy, but primarily a book about the environmental humanities in theory and practice taking Italy as a starting point, as a case study. Ultimately, this book is my way to expose the voices and stories emerging from the Anthropocene starting with those closer to my personal experience. This is not an individual statement, but a wish to create alliances.

 

Serenella Iovino is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Turin, Italy. She is a past president of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment (EASLCE) and author of Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation, now available from Bloomsbury. Her previous books include Ecologia Letteraria (2006) and, as co-editor, Material Ecocriticism (2014).

Environmental Cultures: Day 1

Bloomsbury are delighted to be launching a brand new open access series in ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities. Responding to one of the most urgent issues of our time, the Environmental Cultures series will be publishing innovative new research on the diverse ways in which culture has responded to the age of environmental crisis.

The series is co-edited by Greg Garrard of the University of British Columbia, Canada and Richard Kerridge of Bath Spa University, UK. The first two books are Serenella Iovino’s explorations of Italian landscapes, Ecocriticism and Italy and Hubert Zapf’s study Literature as Cultural Ecology. The full text of both books are available online in full here and published under a creative commons license, with print and ebook editions available to buy.

And here’s Greg Garrard to tell you more about the series himself:

 

 

We’ll be celebrating the launch of this exciting new series with a week of posts here on the Bloomsbury Literary Studies blog:

• On Tuesday, we have a Q&A with Serenella Iovino who will tell us more about the first book in the series, Ecocriticism and Italy
• On Wednesday, Hubert Zapf will preview his just published book, Literature as Cultural Ecology
• On Thursday, well be hearing from three members of the series’ international Editorial Board – Mandy Bloomfield (University of Plymouth, UK), Pablo Mukherjee (University of Warwick, UK) and Christa Grewe-Volpp (University of Mannheim, Germany) – about their hopes for the series
• And, on Friday, we’ll have a video from Series Editor Richard Kerridge on the types of books we’re hoping to publish in the future.

So, stay tuned!

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.

Crunch Lit: The Future of Finance

Guest post by Katy Shaw

The financial world has long been a source of fascination for writers, and this intensified in the wake of the credit crunch. In my new monograph Crunch Lit I argue that following the financial crisis, literature was mobilised as an effective means of cultural resistance—a site for the struggle over the legitimacy of reality. Rewriting events, literary representations offer fictionalized micro-histories of a highly contested period that engage in a dialogic interaction with the lived fallout from the crisis. As part of a challenge to define the events of 2007–8, authors interrogate the capacity of contemporary genre writing to represent a new millennial crisis of credit and understand its legacy for contemporary society. Using writings not as a form of imaginative escape from the chaotic and confusing reality facing global economic systems, but as an exercise in critical understanding and reframing, they suggest that contemporary writings can be relevant and revealing in their social and political purpose.

Collectively, the corpus of cultural representations analysed by Crunch Lit – from stage drama and musicals, to stand-up comedy, reality television and movie screenplays – highlights the interconnected state of finance and society during and after the credit crunch. Reframing our relationship with and understanding of contemporary finance, these works transgress the boundaries of established narratives on finance and instead offer critical and alternative standpoints on the financialization of society in the new millennium. In literary examinations of what went wrong, why, and where the finger of blame should be pointed, artists foreground the financial ignorance of the pre-crunch period, the drama of events as credit froze and the benefit of hindsight afforded to cultural interventions created in the post-crunch period.

 

The credit crunch of 2007–8 made visible the impact of financialization across society, culture politic and the economy in the twenty-first century. More fundamentally, it revealed a new narrative: that savers, spenders and lenders were variously implicated in its international circuits of influence. The recognition that contemporary global capitalism cannot be dismissed or escaped has led to a fresh desire to engage with and understand it. The problem of what happens after the credit crunch, of how to ‘correct’ identified flaws in our financial systems and cultures, to improve public financial literacy and engineer a new relationship between the social and the economic, is a profoundly collective one.

The way forward raises important economic, social, political and moral questions for twenty-first-century societies. The consequences of the credit crunch will affect societies for years to come. In their response to the crunch, the governments of the UK and the United States transferred the debt bubble from a private to a public sector problem. While banks were given huge sums of money to be bailed out, public spending was cut across sectors in a desperate attempt to balance the books.

Admitting that something is not working is a vital step towards recognition and an impetus to change. Encouraging us to stop dreaming, cultural representations of the 2007–8 credit crunch form part of a wider dialogue about the need to move towards a new system, one governed by tighter regulation, intelligent finance and an end to the mystifications that have masked the operation of the financial sector to date. Improving financial literacy, enhancing awareness of the internal mechanisms of contemporary finance and critically reviewing the impact of financialization on twenty-first-century society, Crunch Lit foregrounds the need to think carefully about contemporary uses of capital, and the possibility of making capital our servant, rather than our master.

In 2010, the Archbishop of Canterbury in the UK, Rowan Williams, used an open lecture to tell the public that the credit crunch has taught us that ‘economics is too important to be left to economists’. Offering accessible contexts and intelligible representations of hitherto seemingly unpresentable events, they foster new communities of understanding, reframing the period of economic freedom preceding the crunch. From the rise of finance during the 1980s, to the fast finance of the 1990s, and the emergence of a financialization in the new millennium, new literary representations of the 2007–8 credit crunch remind contemporary audiences that value does not begin, and end, with the economic.


Katy Shaw is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Director of C21: Centre for Twenty-First Century Writings at the University of Brighton, UK. She is the author of Crunch Lit, part of Bloomsbury's series 21st Century Genre Fiction. Her previous publications include David Peace: Texts and Contexts and Funny Women: Gender and Comedy in the 21st Century.

To dust, or not to dust?

Guest post by Michael Marder

To dust, or not to dust? That is not the question. We have no other choice but to do both things at the same time: dusting as in tidying up our dwellings—an arduous and infinite task—and as in spreading the dust of our bodies and clothes around. A key lesson of my book Dust (Object Lessons) is that this powdery substance envelops and levels crude oppositions that follow the model of “X or not X,” on which the logical principle of non-contradiction is based. It decides us into finite existence before we have a chance to decide what to do with it.

You realize, of course, that the question I have playfully posed in this blog entry is a variation on Hamlet’s ponderous “To be, or not to be?” Herein lies another hint as to what I am after in my text. Dust is not so much what remains of being, but the substitute for being in our age, which Nietzsche poetically and prophetically called “the twilight of the idols.” Being, impregnated by time, is dust. Space, filled with dust, is extended time. The unequal amount of time it takes to grind a book’s cover, your skin, tree pollen, a metal doorknob, and fibers of wool into dust are the unique signatures of all these finite beings.

So, when I selected dust as an “object” to draw lessons from, I chose nothing less than a figure of being, appropriate for the end of metaphysics, that is, for the end of grand, totalizing narratives about the most essential makeup of what is. We live and breathe in the dust, and increasingly so day by day. Why not learn to think in the dust as well, instead of forcing our thoughts into the oxygen- and reality-free realm of pure ideas, divine substances, or absolute spirit? That is what postmetaphysics feels, looks, and smells like.

We might read the “to” of “to dust” not only as the (rather obvious) marker of the verb’s infinitive form, but also as a preposition followed by a noun and indicating a certain destination. Together with other animate and inanimate entities, we are invariably on our way to it. To dust! is the unwitting slogan of everything that is. For this reason, too, the question of my entry title is not in earnest. Needless to say, this pen, this hand holding the pen, this body to which the hand with the pen is attached, and this inimitable world holding (otherwise, “existentially”) the body with the hand clasping the pen are destined to dust. Exactly when each reaches it—is only a matter of time.

Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. His most recent monographs include The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (2014), Pyropolitics: When the World Is Ablaze (2015), and Dust, recently released in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series. He is now completing a book, co-authored with Luce Irigaray and titled Through Vegetal Being.

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.