Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

Franz Kafka, The Sons (Schocken).
Design: Peter Mendelsund.

Literature:

Samuel Beckett: This week's Ends and Odds over at Samuel Beckett: Debts & Legacies
Patti Smith on Virginia Woolf
Stanley Fish: Adam Haslett reviews critic's new book, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One
William Burroughs' Home Movies: Features Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and others
Phillip Pullman: Call to defend libraries resounds around web
James Joyce reads Finnegans Wake
James Joyce: Ulysses, illustrated with historical documents and photographs
James Joyce: Frank Callanan on the political attitudes of Ireland's high modernist
J. D. Salinger's Private Passions
Can Literature be Philosophical? James Ryerson on the philosophical novel
Writers Obsessed with Writers
Margaret Atwood: A new collection of scholarly articles exploring Atwood's work
Joseph Conrad: Phil Mongredien on Joseph Conrad's classic novel of postcolonial corruption
W. G. Sebald: W. G. Sebald turned a walk through Suffolk into an extraordinary book. As a film inspired by the work is premiered, Stuart Jeffries retraces his steps

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Susie Orbach: Orbach talks about bodies (podcast)
Continental Philosophy Bulletin Board: A crisp new design
Roland Barthes: Lori Soderlind reviews Barthes' Mourning Diary in the New York Times

Film:

Werner Herzog: In Conversation, New York, March 23rd, 2011

Art, Design & Photography

Franz Kafka: Peter Mendelsund shares his passion for Kafka, and some forthcoming designs to be released by Schocken
Joyce Carol Oates: Story of photographer Jane Yarborough Creech, whose work is featured on recent Oates memoir
Joris Karl Huysmans: À Rebours illustrated

Thank you to all link contributions, which can be found on the A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

Peter Mendelsund on Franz Kafka

Book designer discusses Schocken's forthcoming Kafka editions

Peter Mendelsund discusses his love for Franz Kafka over at Jacket Mechanical, and offers a sneak-peek of his forthcoming Schocken designs (set for release from June 2011 onwards).

Source: Peter Mendelsund, 'Kafka', Jacket Mechanical, 24 January 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Peter Mendelsund's Book Designs
• Franz Kafka, The Trial (Folio Society)
• Writers: Franz Kafka

Can Literature be Philosophical?

James Ryerson on the philosophical novel

David Foster Wallace

In a recent article in The New York Times, James Ryerson asks an age-old question: can literature be philosophical? Recalling examples from Iris Murdoch to David Foster Wallace, Ryerson discusses how we might define the philosophical novel, and explores the gulf that seems to exist between the two disciplines:

Can a novelist write philosophically? Even those novelists most commonly deemed “philosophical” have sometimes answered with an emphatic no. Iris Murdoch, the longtime Oxford philosopher and author of some two dozen novels treating highbrow themes like consciousness and morality, argued that philosophy and literature were contrary pursuits. Philosophy calls on the analytical mind to solve conceptual problems in an “austere, unselfish, candid” prose, she said in a BBC interview broadcast in 1978, while literature looks to the imagination to show us something “mysterious, ambiguous, particular” about the world. Any appearance of philosophical ideas in her own novels was an inconsequential reflection of what she happened to know. “If I knew about sailing ships I would put in sailing ships,” she said. “And in a way, as a novelist, I would rather know about sailing ships than about philosophy.” [Read more]

James Ryerson, 'The Philosophical Novel'

The New York Times, 20 January 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• David Foster Wallace, Fate, Time and Language
• Sigmund Freud: The Reluctant Philosopher

Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake

A new collection of scholarly articles exploring Atwood's work

J. Brooks Bouson (editor), Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake

In a bulletin for interesting new books being published this year, Conversational Reading is promoting J. Brooks Brouson's edited collection of essays on the work of Margaret Atwood. Simply entitled Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, it includes a critical discussion of some of the major themes in Atwood's work, from trauma, memory and mourning to parody, feminism and environmentalism. In all, a promising collection.

The book was published on 17 January 2011. I've gleaned the following from the Continuum website:

About the Collection

In this critical collection, well-known Atwood scholars offer original readings and critical re-evaluations of three Atwood masterpieces—The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake. Providing new critical assessments of Atwood’s novels in language that is both lively and accessible, Margaret Atwood reveals not only Atwood’s ongoing and evolving engagement with the issues that have long preoccupied her—ranging from the power politics of human relationships to a concern with human rights and the global environment—but also her increasing formal complexity as a novelist. If Atwood is a novelist who is part trickster, illusionist and con-artist, as she has often described herself, she is also, as the essays in this critical collection show, an author-ethicist with a finely honed sense of moral responsibility.

Contents

Series Preface \ Acknowledgments \ 1. Introduction: Negotiating with Margaret Atwood J. Brooks Bouson \ Part I: The Robber Bride (1993) 2. Magical Realism in The Robber Bride and Other Texts Sharon R. Wilson \ 3. Parodic Border Crossings in Atwood’s The Robber Bride Hilde Staels \ 4. You’re History: Living with Trauma in The Robber Bride Laurie Vickroy \ Part II: The Blind Assassin (2000) 5. “Was I My Sister’s Keeper?” The Blind Assassin and Problematic Feminisms Fiona Tolan \ 6. Narrative Multiplicity and the Multi-layered Self in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin Magali Cornier Michael \ 7. “If You Look Long Enough”: Photography, Memory, and Mourning in The Blind Assassin Shuli Barzilai \ Part III: Oryx and Crake (2003) 8. Moral/Environmental Debt in Margaret Atwood’s Payback and Oryx and Crake Shannon Hengen \ 9. Problematic Paradice: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake Karen Stein \ 10. The Apocalyptic Imagination in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake Mark Bosco \ Notes on Chapters \ Works Cited \ Further Reading \ Notes on Contributors \ Index

Reviews

We welcome this new collection of essays on Margaret Atwood’s later novels, the first to include a substantial section on Oryx and Crake. J.Brooks Bouson has assembled an international team of major Atwood scholars who show us fascinating new ways of understanding Atwood’s fiction by highlighting features which range from magic realism to environmentalism and debt, trauma narratives, and her apocalyptic imagination. The critical inventiveness of these essays matches Atwood’s own irrepressibly creative storytelling.

Coral Ann Howells, Professor Emerita, University of Reading, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, UK and co-editor of the Cambridge History of Canadian Literature (CUP, 2009)

Publisher's website: Continuum

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• The Handmaid's Tale celebrates 25th Anniversary

Rainer J. Hanshe, The Acolytes

Eyecorner Press publishes first novel by Hyperion editor

Rainer J. Hanshe, The Acolytes

Some of you will already be familiar with Rainer J. Hanshe for his critical essays, or as the senior editor of Hyperion. What you might not know is that he has just published a novel, The Acolytes, released through Eyecorner Press:

Synopsis: The Acolytes depicts the yearning of the young artist for success, acceptance, fulfillment. Gabriel starts as a naive young man full of dedication to high art and to the transformative powers of the imagination. In Amos, the renegade of American letters and cult figure, Gabriel thinks he has found his guiding star, but Ivan, the charismatic yet sinister theater director exerts a strange, mesmeric power over the author and his entire coterie. Terence, the unobtrusive moral fulcrum of the novel, and a cast of others are unable to escape from the welter of exploitation to which their lack of self-knowledge condemns them.

Praise for The Acolytes

Hanshe’s Aristophanic critique of Amos Latimer and his acolytes and two different modes of discipleship articulates something that can be seen in many other regions of life and society: Plato and Aristotle, Leo Strauss and Arendt, Malcom X and the Nation, and the cult of fame. The fascinating thing, and part of the reason why his account is archetypical in a profound and broadly historically applicable manner, is that the contrast between sharing in speech shamelessly and not sharing is what differentiates the two modes of aesthetics in classical antiquity: the misanthropic and the philanthropic. The Acolytes is a brave work that says something of extraordinary importance for our understanding of political culture and culture more generally. Hanshe faces the issue of sex ontologically in a way that other American writers do not. He joins Burroughs in critically addressing the depths of the question of sexuality and control and brings the parallel that Burroughs wrote about in colonialism and militarism and the CIA to the left wing, avant-garde. A moving and impressive book.

Rachael Sotos, New School University

The Acolytes is a riveting, slightly surreal portrait of the bohemian underworld of New York and it exposes the sinister underside of the ever-beckoning dream of art. It shows with fascinating nuance the multi-faceted nature of artistic ambition, illuminating a range from lofty yearning to diabolical craving for power. It is the kind of work one would not expect from a young American writer today. It is a powerful novel that reverberates in the inner spaces of the self.

Walter H. Sokel, The Writer in Extremis; The Myth of Power & Self: Essays on Kafka

The Acolytes flies in the face of mainstream publishing with its eye on something bigger and vaster than the conventional marketplace. In mode its allegorical approach is so different than the types of Jonathan Franzen “family sagas” that publishers pick up on nowadays. It’s quirky, weird, and mannered and many of the scenes have the strange power of dreams. They proceed according to their own logic, stately as yachts, moving irrevocably, like Time. Like John Cowper Powys, Hanshe has the talent for making other species come to life.

Kevin Killian

Publisher

Eyecorner Press

Revisiting the Heart of Darkness

Phil Mongredien on Joseph Conrad's classic novel of postcolonial corruption

Marlon Brando plays Kurtz in Apocalypse Now! Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Published in The Observer on Sunday, Phil Mongredien revisits the dark and troubling landscape of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a short novel famously adapted in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now!. For Mongredien, Conrad's text offers 'as powerful a condemnation of imperialism as has ever been written, and still a deeply unsettling read more than a century on'. [Read more]

Source: Phil Mongredien, 'Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad – review', The Observer, 23 January 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Heart of Darkness: Graphic Novel
• Philip Roth on Literature and Teaching

James Joyce: Political Controversialist

Frank Callanan on the political attitudes of Ireland's high modernist

James Joyce, Paris, 1937. Photograph: Joseph Breitenbach

In a recent article for the Irish Times, Frank Callanan explores recently unearthed evidence pointing to the political leanings and attitudes of writer James Joyce (link via Susan Tomaselli):

James Joyce had graduated from University College Dublin in September 1902 and was in Paris from December 3rd to 22nd that year, on the risible pretext of studying medicine at the Sorbonne. After an extended Christmas in Dublin, Joyce was back in Paris from January 17th to April 10th, 1903, impecunious and undernourished, at the Hôtel Corneille, a now-vanished Irish lieu de mémoire in Paris, on Rue Corneille, flanking the Théâtre de l’Odéon. His sudden return to Dublin was brought about by the last illness of his mother. May Joyce lingered, dying on August 13th, 1903. Joyce thereafter remained in Dublin until he left on October 8th, 1904, with Nora Barnacle to commence what transpired to be a lifelong exile from Ireland.

The intrinsic significance of Joyce’s transcription of the two United Irishman lists will be a subject of debate. Its extrinsic significance is the proof it affords that Joyce was reading the United Irishman at the time he was in Paris and that he was not drawn to the paper solely by reason of its political content. It bears out the recollection of Joyce’s brother Stanislaus that Joyce had declared that “the United Irishman was the only paper in Dublin worth reading, and in fact he read it every week”. [Read more]

Frank Callanan, 'Why Joyce, the 'bohemian aesthete', was also a political controversialist'

The Irish Times, 22 January 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Literary Mentorships: James Joyce and Samuel Beckett
• Joycean Literature: Literature & Poetry 1910-2010
• James Joyce: Death and Wake
• Is Modernism Boring?
• 'A House of Life': Anthony Burgess on James Joyce
• Re Joyce

Joyce Carol Oates and Jane Yarborough Creech

Story of the photographer whose work adorns Oates memoir

Detail of the photograph by Jane Yarborough Creech to appear on Joyce Carol Oates' forthcoming book.

We're all told never to judge a book by its cover, but that's not to say book covers don't have their own story to tell. Journal Watchdog reports an interesting story concerning a photographer and Joyce Carol Oates' A Widow's Story: A Memoir:

Early last year Jane Yarborough Creech’s doctor found her low hemoglobin levels were not caused by simple anemia, but by colon cancer.
She needed surgery.

But then a curious thing happened. The Greenville photographer learned her artwork would grace the cover of Pulitzer-Prize nominated author Joyce Carol Oates’ forthcoming book, "A Widow’s Story: A Memoir,” scheduled for release Feb. 15.

The news helped Creech – a mother of four and grandmother to six – battle the disease.

“It was good news at a sad time. When she was in the hospital I kept telling her that she had a lot to live for, the Joyce Carol Oates book being published,” said one of her daughters, Janie Creech. [Read more]

Kristi Eaton, ''Real, Surreal'

Journal Watchdog, 21 January 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Joyce Carol Oates, Give Me Your Heart
• Joyce Carol Oates, Sourland
• Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country
• Joyce Carol Oates on Trauma and Adolescence
• Ten Rules for Writing Fiction
• Joyce Carol Oates on Bob Dylan

How to Write a Sentence

Adam Haslett reviews new book by critic Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One

Adam Haslett reviews Stanley Fish's How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One in the Financial Times, discussing how Fish's work might elucidate that of David Foster Wallace and W. G. Sebald:

This question of how forms of writing produce forms of thought is one that the literary critic and legal scholar Stanley Fish has been wrestling with most of his career. He first came to prominence in the late 1970s with his theory of “interpretative communities”. This held that all readings of literary texts are inescapably bound up with the cultural assumptions of readers, an uncontroversial proposition now but one that quickly earned him the sloppy epithet of “relativist”. In the late 1980s and early 1990s he turned the Duke University English department into the headquarters of the then burgeoning “theory” industry before, in 1999, surprising the academic world by moving to the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he set himself the task of trying to renovate undergraduate education in basic skills like writing. Though he doesn’t mention that experience in his new book, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One, it’s not far off stage. The problem with Strunk & White, in Fish’s view, is that “they assume a level of knowledge and understanding only some of their readers will have attained,” that is, the Cornell kids whose secondary education did at least a halfway decent job of teaching them the basics. [Read more]

Adam Haslett, 'The art of good writing'

Financial Times, 21 January 2011

Patti Smith on Virginia Woolf

American poet and musician pays tribute on the anniversary of Woolf's death

Patti Smith pays tribute to Virginia Woolf, Fondation Cartier, 28 March 2008 [via Lauren Elkin and 3:AM Magazine].

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Is Modernism Boring?

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

Bob Dylan. Photograph: Daniel Kramer.

Literature:

London Review of Books: Winter Lecture s 2011: Includes Judith Butler on Franz Kafka, T. J. Clark on Picasso's Guernica and Elif Batuman on Cervantes and Balzac.
Joycean Literature: Fiction and Poetry 1910-2010: An academic conference to be held at the University of London, June 2011
James Joyce & Samuel Beckett: Top 10 Literary Mentorships
Joyce Carol Oates: New short story collection, Give Me Your Heart
Thomas Bernhard: German television documentary, spanning 1967-88
Beat Generation: Neal Cassady's wife, Carolyn, is interviewed by The Guardian on life with the Beats
J. D. Salinger: David L. Ulin reviews Jeffrey Slawenski's J. D. Salinger: A Life
Jorge Luis Borges: Martin Schifino reviews five new anthologies of the Borges' work
Jorge Luis Borges: The Riddle of Poetry, a lecture delivered at Harvard University 1967.
H. P. Lovecraft: GalleyCat presents a free documentary
Edgar Allan Poe: For the second time in two years, the mysterious 'Poe Toaster' fails to appear at the writer's gravesite

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Roland Barthes: Columbia University Press publishes The Preparation of the Novel
Roland Barthes: Mairéad Hanrahan reviews Barthes' The Preparation of the Novel in the Times Literary Supplement
Roland Barthes: University of York launches a new reading group based around Barthes' The Neutral
Susan Sontag: Varia celebrates the birthday of the renowned cultural critic
Friedrich Nietzsche: Slate on why Nietzsche is so often misunderstood by angry young men
Jacques Derrida speaks about 'Forgiveness'

Film:

65 Things You Didn't Know About David Lynch

Art & Design

Ezra Stoller: Exploring Mad Men era New York through the photography of Ezra Stoller

Theatre

Thomas Bernhard: A translation of Elisabeth II
Frankenstein: The Guardian on Danny Boyle's new production at the National
Theatre and Performance: An online preview

Music

Bob Dylan: American musician signs six-book deal, which will include two further volumes in the Chronicles series
Patti Smith appears on Charlie Rose
Joy Division: Recordings from two Dutch concerts

Etc.

Woody Allen: 'Money Can Buy Happiness-As If', in the New Yorker
Thank you to all link contributions, which can be found on the A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

J. D. Salinger: A Life

David L. Ulin reviews Slawenski's biography of the reclusive American author

Kenneth Slawenski, J. D. Salinger: A Life

Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin passes verdict on a recent biography of J. D. Salinger. Kenneth Slawenski's ambitious volume, J. D. Salinger: A Life, attempts to uncover and explain the reclusive American author with recourse to archive materials and unpublished writings. But while Slawenski's analysis of little-known material offers new insight on Salinger's work, Ulin remains critical of the biography as a whole:

A year after his death on Jan. 27, 2010, it's tough to know how to assess J.D. Salinger; there are too many loose ends. How can we miss a writer who removed himself from the public conversation nearly half a century before he died? At the same time, nothing in the last 12 months has suggested any loosening of the grip he maintained on his writing while he was alive. Whatever Salinger may have produced since his last published piece, the novella "Hapworth 16, 1924," appeared in the New Yorker in 1965 remains out of reach.

So while Kenneth Slawenski's "J.D.Salinger: A Life" is the first comprehensive biography of the reclusive author, it does little to resolve the issue of Salinger's legacy. Instead, it is more an extended letter from a fan. Since 2004, Slawenski has been the proprietor of DeadCaulfields.com, a website devoted to all things Salinger, and he's been working on this project for longer than that. Originally published last March in England under the title "J.D. Salinger: A Life Raised High," his is a book that blends workman-like doggedness with a fair amount of critical overstatement while still managing to frame its subject's life. [Read more]

David L. Ulin, 'Book review: 'J.D. Salinger: A Life' by Kenneth Slawenski'

Los Angeles Times, 23 January 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• J. D. Salinger 1919-2010
• Writers' Autographs

Jorge Luis Borges, The Riddle of Poetry

Audio recording of the 1967 lecture

Jorge Luis Borges, 'The Riddle Of Poetry', a lecture delivered at Harvard University 1967. (Link via 3:AM Magazine.)

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Jorge Luis Borges, The Mirror Man
• Jorge Luis Borges and the Latin American Novel
• Writers interviewed in The Paris Review
• Jorge Luis Borges in Translation

Literary Mentorships: James Joyce and Samuel Beckett

Flavorwire lists their top ten literary mentorships

James Joyce (left) and Samuel Beckett (right)

Flavorwire select their top ten literary mentorships, including Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Joyce Carol Oates and more. This is what they have to say about James Joyce and Samuel Beckett:

After being introduced by a mutual colleague, Samuel Beckett befriended the renowned Ulysses author and served as his assistant on research for what would later become Finnegans Wake. Beckett was displeased, however, by how much his writing was reminiscent of Joyce. In a letter to him, Beckett observes about an early poem, “Of course it stinks of Joyce in spite of most earnest endeavors to endow it with my own colors.” This led the celebrated playwright to find a literary voice by creating one in opposition to his mentor’s. “James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could,” Beckett once said. “I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.” [Read more]

Kirthana Ramisetti, 'A History of Famous Literary Mentorships'

Flavorwire, 19 January 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Joycean Literature: Literature & Poetry 1910-2010
• James Joyce: Death and Wake
• Is Modernism Boring?
• 'A House of Life': Anthony Burgess on James Joyce
• Re Joyce

Jorge Luis Borges in Translation

Martin Schifino reviews five new anthologies of Borges' work

Jorge Luis Borges

Martin Schifino offers a complex and fascinating review of the work of Jorge Luis Borges, recently published in five new English translations. While the review, published in The Times Literary Supplement, sums up the strengths and weaknesses of each volume, Schifino ultimately defers to the original language texts: 'Just as Borges learned German to read Heine and Italian to read Dante, it is possible to learn Spanish. Borges is worth the journey.' [Read more]

Source: Martin Schifino, 'The unknown Jorge Luis Borges', Times Literary Supplement, 19 January 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Jorge Luis Borges, The Mirror Man
• Jorge Luis Borges and the Latin American Novel
• Writers interviewed in The Paris Review

Bob Dylan to release Chronicles II and III

American songwriter signs a six-book deal with Simon & Schuster

Douglas R. Gilbert/Redferns/Getty

It's very exciting to hear news that American songwriter Bob Dylan has signed a six-book deal with publishers Simon & Schuster. Since the positive critical response to his first memoir, Chronicles: Volume I in 2004, possible sequels have been eagerly anticipated. The new deal, recently reported in Rolling Stone, suggests two further volumes in the Chronicles series, and a third based on dialogue from the Theme Time Radio Hour series. Andy Greene reports that: 'It's unclear what the other three books are going to be. According to the Crain's, Dylan's literary agent Andrew Wylie was seeking an eight-figure deal for the books.' [Read more] (link via Susan Tomaselli)

Source: Andy Greene, 'Bob Dylan signs Six-Book Deal', Rolling Stone, 18 Janury 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Joyce Carol Oates on Bob Dylan
• Will Self on Bob Dylan
• Bob Dylan & His Band

Joycean Literature: Fiction and Poetry 1910-2010

13-14 June 2011

Design: Rhys Tranter

Joycean Literature: Fiction and Poetry 1910-2010
13-14 June, 2011

Institute of English Studies, University of London,
Senate House

About the Conference

Plenary Speakers:
Professor Derek Attridge (York)
and, as John Coffin Memorial Lecturer, Professor Michael Wood (Princeton)

James Joyce's influence on literature has been enormous. This conference will examine Joyce's complex international impact on fiction, long or short, and on poetry. The field remains under-explored. Valuable studies have appeared: either following the links between Joyce and individual authors (Beckett most obviously) or asking about Joyce's example for the twentieth-century avant-garde. In Irish Studies, too, a strong sense has obtained of Joyce as challenge and example. But much productive work remains to be done to bring these strands together, to broaden the range of influences considered, and to ask critical questions about the nature of influence and legacy. We want to consider Joyce as model, shadow, inspiration, irritation or obstacle for a roster of writers like the following:

Amis
Auden
Ballard
Banville
Beckett
Borges
Bowen
Brooke
Rose
Burgess
Burroughs
Coetzee
DeLillo

[Click here for a complete list]

This two-day conference will address these and other questions through particular studies or broader enquiries. The conference will feature some forty papers alongside prestigious plenary speakers, chosen from the most dynamic critics and writers at work today.

Call for Papers

Please send proposals of up to 300 words, for 20-minute papers, to both Joe Brooker (j.brooker@bbk.ac.uk) and Finn Fordham (finn.fordham@rhul.ac.uk) by James Joyce's 129th birthday, 2 February 2011.

General Enquiries

Jon Millington (Events Officer)
Institute of English Studies
Senate House
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HU

Tel +44 (0) 207 664 4859
Email jon.millington@sas.ac.uk.

The School of Advanced Study is part of the central University of London.

The School takes its responsibility to visitors with special needs very seriously and will endeavour to make reasonable adjustments to its facilities in order to accommodate the needs of such visitors. If you have a particular requirement, please feel free to discuss it confidentially with the organiser in advance of the event taking place.

Website: Joycean Literature: Fiction and Poetry 1910-2010, University of London

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• James Joyce: Death and Wake
• Is Modernism Boring?
• 'A House of Life': Anthony Burgess on James Joyce
• Re Joyce

Joyce Carol Oates, Give Me Your Heart

A new collection from the American storyteller

Joyce Carol Oates, Give Me Your Heart

Celestial Timepiece has drawn my attention to a review of Joyce Carol Oates' latest collection of short stories, Give Me Your Heart, over at Mostly Fiction:

Give Me Your Heart, the newest collection of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates, shimmers with violence, actual or imagined. Reading these stories is like hearing footsteps in your home when you know you’re the only one there. They’re like seeing something impossible out of the corner of your eye and being sure that you’ve seen it no matter what your rational self tells you. The stories make your heart race and your eyes open wide in horror. They do not come to us gently. Joyce Carol Oates grabs the reader and pulls him into her unique vision where fear, panic, tension, death, love and murder prevail, often simultaneously. These are horror stories without any element of the super-natural. She’s the real McCoy of this genre. [Read more]

Bonnie Brody, 'Give Me Your Heart by Joyce Carol Oates'

MostlyFiction Book Reviews, 17 January 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Joyce Carol Oates, Sourland
• Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country
• Joyce Carol Oates on Trauma and Adolescence
• Ten Rules for Writing Fiction
• Joyce Carol Oates on Bob Dylan

Carolyn Cassady on the Beat Generation

Cassady shares her memories of Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs and life with the Beats

Neal Cassady (left) and Jack Kerouac (right)

The Guardian interviews Carolyn Cassady about Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. She also answers questions on what it was like to be married to Neal Cassidy, the inspiration behind Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel, On the Road:

When you think of the Beats, you think of free sex and flaming sunsets, of bulbous '49 Hudsons easing towards the horizon on dusty highways that seem to go on for ever. You don't think about roundabouts, recycling centres and Rover estates. But that's what you get in Bracknell and it's in Bracknell, near Windsor, that one of the last surviving members of the Beat generation lives.

Carolyn Cassady opens the door to her pretty green cottage with a lipsticked grin and a shy handshake. She's 87, but looks a decade younger, dressed neatly in a lavender fleece with matching moccasins. The second wife of Beat muse Neal Cassady – the man immortalised as Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's 1957 classic On the Road – Carolyn moved to London in 1983, and relocated here 10 years later. "I was brought up English," she says. "My parents were anglophiles and we had a whole lot of English customs at home. I made the break and I much prefer it." [Read more]

Source: Lauren Cochrane, 'Neal Cassady: Drug-taker. Bigamist. Family man', The Guardian, 16 January 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Writers: William S. Burroughs
• Bringing Ginsberg's Howl to the Screen
• Kerouac and Ginsberg Correspondence
• The Photography of Tom Palumbo

Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel

French theorist's lectures explore the writing process

Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel

Columbia University Press are publishing a new book from the French critical theorist Roland Barthes. Entitled The Preparation of the Novel, it comprises a collection of lectures which 'move from the desire to write to the actual decision making, planning, and material act of producing a novel' (link via Conversational Reading):

Completed just weeks before his death, the lectures in this volume mark a critical juncture in the career of Roland Barthes, in which he declared the intention, deeply felt, to write a novel. Unfolding over the course of two years, Barthes engaged in a unique pedagogical experiment: he combined teaching and writing to "simulate" the trial of novel-writing, exploring every step of the creative process along the way.

Barthes's lectures move from the desire to write to the actual decision making, planning, and material act of producing a novel. He meets the difficulty of transitioning from short, concise notations (exemplified by his favorite literary form, haiku) to longer, uninterrupted flows of narrative, and he encounters a number of setbacks. Barthes takes solace in a diverse group of writers, including Dante, whose La Vita Nuova was similarly inspired by the death of a loved one, and he turns to classical philosophy, Taoism, and the works of François-René Chateaubriand, Gustave Flaubert, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust.

This book uniquely includes eight elliptical plans for Barthes's unwritten novel, which he titled Vita Nova, and lecture notes that sketch the critic's views on photography. Following on The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977-1978) and a third forthcoming collection of Barthes lectures, this volume provides an intensely personal account of the labor and love of writing. [Read more]

Publisher's website: Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège de France (1978-1979 and 1979-1980), Columbia University Press

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
• Neil Badmington on Roland Barthes and Mythologies
• Michael Wood on Roland Barthes
• Reading on Roland Barthes on Reading
• Roland Barthes on Cafés
• In Theory: Barthes' Death of the Author
• An Almost Obsessive Relation to Writing Instruments

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

Thomas Bernhard

Literature:

British Library Online Manuscript Gallery
Is Modernism Boring? Why James Joyce and Virginia Woolf shouldn't be gathering dust on your shelf
Thomas Bernhard: On Perfection and Failure
Thomas Bernhard: Memorable quotations from novels and interviews
Thomas Bernhard: From Wittgenstein's Nephew
Gabriel Josipovici on Thomas Bernhard
James Joyce: Death and Wake
Roberto Bolaño on Literature and Exile
Franz Kafka: An animated adaptation of 'A Country Doctor'
Franz Kafka: John Banville on Kafka, Felice Bauer and Elias Canetti
Franz Kafka: A new illustrated edition of The Trial from the Folio Society, with an introduction by John Banville
New York Writers: City Journal on NYC's rich literary heritage
New Look Spike Magazine
Celebrity Bookshelves: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson, Oprah Winfrey, Greta Garbo, Kelsey Grammer and more
William S. Burroughs: 1983 BBC Documentary presented by Alan Yentob, and featuring interviews with major Beat Generation figures
William Shakespeare: Alistair Fowler reviews Don Paterson's Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets: A New Commentary
Joyce Carol Oates on Charles Baxter
Dante Alighieri: How Galileo was influenced by Dante's Divine Comedy
Joseph Conrad: On science fiction novel, The Inheritors

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

J. G. Ballard: Ballardian's very on Simon Sellars to release Applied Ballardianism: the philosophy of J. G. Ballard in 2012
Harper Collins Philosophy Catalogue: New and forthcoming 2011
Time and Space in Contemporary Women's Writing: September 2011
Philosophy of Time Society Forum: Call for Papers
Philosophy Bites: Review of David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton's recent book
Emmanuel Levinas: Joshua Shaw reviews Michaël de Saint Cheron's Conversations with Emmanuel Levinas, 1983-1994
Michel Foucault: Foucault Studies 10: Foucault and Agamben
Sigmund Freud: Review of Alfred I. Tauber's new book, The Reluctant Philosopher
Slavoj Žižek: Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks

Film:

Orson Welles: Welles directs and stars in The Stranger (1946), now freely available to watch online

Art & Design

Sigmund Freud: The Freud Museum celebrates the New Yorker's psychoanalytic comic strip, On the Couch
Top 10 Typefaces Used by Book Design Winners
Samuel Beckett: Among Ronald Searle's Eye-View series for Punch (1961-2)

Theatre

William Shakespeare: Roundtable Discussion: 'The Imagination of Hamlet': Robert Brustein, Christian Camargo, Paul Fry (moderator), Laura Levine, Eugene Mahon, Susanne Wofford

Music

Joyce Carol Oates on Bob Dylan: Oates explained why she dedicated 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?' to the American songwriter
Björk Covers Joy Division
Library of Congress Receives Record Donation: Including Fats Waller, Bing Cosby and Louis Armstrong

Thank you to all link contributions, which can be found on the A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

William S. Burroughs: BBC Documentary

Classic 1983 documentary presented by Alan Yentob

UPDATE: Video has been removed due to copyright restrictions.

Dangerous Minds stumbles across a BBC documentary about American writer William S. Burroughs. Paul Gallagher has more:

Burroughs was originally made in 1983 by Howard Brookner and Alan Yentob, as part of the BBC’s art strand Arena, and updated after Burrough’s death in 1997. It is an exceptional documentary, one that gives an intimate and revealing portrait of Burroughs, as he revisits his childhood home; discusses his up-bringing with his brother, Mortimer; his friendship with Jack Kerouac, Allen Gisnberg, and Brion Gysin; and has a reunion with artist Francis Bacon, who Burroughs knew in Tangier. Other contributors include Laurie Anderson, Terry Southern, Patti Smith, and James Grauerholz. [Read more]

Paul Gallagher, 'BBC's Classic Documentary on William Burroughs'

Dangerous Minds, 15 January 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• David Bowie, Cracked Actor Documentary
• Writers: William S. Burroughs

Franz Kafka, The Trial (Folio Society)

The Folio Society presents a new edition of Kafka's classic novel

Franz Kafka, The Trial (Folio Society, 2011)

Illustration from Franz Kafka's The Trial (Folio Society, 2011)

Illustration from Franz Kafka's The Trial (Folio Society, 2011)

This month, The Folio Society publishes a new illustrated edition of Franz Kafka's The Trial, with an introduction by John Banville.

Book details
Publication date: January 2011
Introduced by John Banville
Bound in paper, printed with a design by Bill Bragg
Set in Elysium, 212 pages
Frontispiece and 6 colour illustrations
9” x 61/4”

Publisher's page: Franz Kafka,The Trial, Folio Society

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Banville: Franz Kafka's other trial
• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Franz Kafka's The Trial
• Introducing... Franz Kafka
• Writers' Autographs

Banville: Franz Kafka's other trial

John Banville on Kafka, Felice Bauer and Elias Canetti

Kafka and Felice Bauer. Photograph: © Bettmann/CORBIS

In an article for The Guardian, novelist John Banville revisits Franz Kafka's distinctive novel, The Trial, and, with reference to short stories, letters and diary entries, discusses the themes that have made it a contemporary classic:

The artist, says Kafka, is the one who has nothing to say. By which he means that art, true art, carries no message, has no opinion, does not attempt to coerce or persuade, but simply – simply! – bears witness. Ironically, we find this dictum particularly hard to accept in the case of his own work, which comes to us with all the numinous weight and opacity of a secret testament, the codes of which we seem required to decrypt. The Trial, we feel, cannot be merely the simple story of a man, Josef K, who gets caught up in a judicial process – the book's German title is Der Prozeß – that will lead with nightmarish inevitability to his execution. Surely it is at least an allegory of fallen man's predicament, of his state of enduring and irredeemable guilt in a world from which all hope has been expunged. Yet the book has its direct sources in the mundane though extreme circumstances of Kafka's own life, and specifically in what Elias Canetti calls Kafka's "other trial".

It is surprising at first to learn that Flaubert was Kafka's favourite writer, yet Kafka, as a moment's reflection will show, was every bit as strong a realist as the author of Madame Bovary or (the master's work that Kafka most admired) L'Éducation sentimentale. Poor Max Brod, the friend whom Kafka on his deathbed enjoined to burn his unpublished manuscripts, has been scoffed at for his determination to present Kafka as a religious writer, but the misapprehension is understandable. The Trial, The Castle and especially the stories, feel like religious parables – the chapter in The Trial called "In the Cathedral" might be a passage from one of the more obscure books of the Bible, or a gnomic exercise out of the Talmud. [Read more]

John Banville, 'Rereading: John Banville on Kafka's other trial'

guardian.co.uk, 14 January 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Franz Kafka's The Trial
• Introducing... Franz Kafka
• Franz Kafka, The Trial (Folio Society)
• Writers' Autographs

Orson Welles' The Stranger (1946)

The director's post-war film noir now freely available to watch online

Orson Welles directs and stars in The Stranger (1946), which is freely available to watch here on A Piece of Monologue. (Link via Open Culture.)

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Chris Petit, Radio On

On the Couch: Freud and the New Yorker

The Freud Museum pays tribute to the New Yorker's psychoanalytic comic strip

The New Yorker, 23 May 2005

The ever-resourceful Shrink at Large (Dr Jay Watts) has drawn my attention to the online archives of the Freud Museum in London. Specifically, an online gallery of images from their On the Couch event, held back in 2006. Entitled On the Couch: Psychoanalysis in Cartoons, Art from The New Yorker, the website pays tribute to the long-standing comic strip, while offering a selection of comic gems:

Because psychoanalysis is a serious business, it has become a classic target of cartoonists. Freud said that cartoons represent "a rebellion against [...] authority, a liberation from the oppression it imposes". On the Couch documents nearly 80 years of this rebellion.

Since The New Yorker published its first “psychoanalytic” cartoon in 1927, its cartoonists have continually renewed the topic within the context of their own times. This exhibition presented “the shrink and the shrunk, the practitioner and the practiced upon…” as they were represented in cartoons from the archives of The New Yorker. After their first outing in New York 80 years’ worth of American couches came home to roost around the original psychoanalytic couch at the Freud Museum.

The exhibition was centered around five main themes: "The Doctor/Patient Relationship", "The Couch", "Beyond the Couch", "Off the Wall" and 2Cartoons Then and Now" [Read more]

Freud Museum, London

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Sigmund Freud: The Reluctant Philosopher
• Freud and Global Economic Collapse
• Ballard: 'Freud was a born storyteller'
• Freud and Yeats on Wikipedia
• Freud and Love
• Open Yale Courses: Theories of Literature

James Joyce: Death and Wake

On the anniversary of Joyce's death

James Joyce

Steve King continues his 'Today in Literature' series with the passing of James Joyce during the Second World War:

On this day in 1941, James Joyce died in Zurich at the age of fifty-eight from peritonitis brought on by a perforated ulcer. Even without the dislocation of WWII, Joyce's last years were beset with difficulties—the schizophrenia of his daughter, his son's floundering career and broken marriage, his eyesight, ongoing battles over Ulysses and new worries about Finnegans Wake. "Though not so blind as Homer, and not so exiled as Dante," writes biographer Richard Ellmann, "he had reached his life's nadir." [Read more]

Steve King, 'Joyce's Death and Wake'

Barnes & Noble Review, 13 January 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Is Modernism Boring?
• 'A House of Life': Anthony Burgess on James Joyce
• Re Joyce

Josipovici on Thomas Bernhard

Gabriel Josipovici weighs in on Bernhard's darkly comic prose

Thomas Bernhard

Writer and critic Gabriel Josipovici has written a lively and enthusiastic article for the New Statesman, declaring Thomas Bernhard 'the most truthful, the funniest and the most musical of writers since Marcel Proust':

Thomas Bernhard, Austria's finest postwar writer, was born in Holland in 1931, the illegitimate son of a housemaid, and died at his home in Upper Austria in 1989. His childhood was spent mainly with his maternal grandparents near Salzburg - his grandfather Johannes Freumbichler was a minor Austrian writer and, Bernhard claimed, one of the two most important figures in his life. The other, whom he sometimes referred to as his "Lebensmensch" or "life companion" and sometimes as his aunt, was a woman 37 years his senior, the widow of a civil servant, whom he met at a sanatorium for tuberculosis in 1949. Bernhard had always had a weak chest and the deprivations of the war years, exacerbated by having to lug sacks of potatoes from the cellar to the grocery where he had been apprenticed after leaving school, led to his hospitalisation in 1948. His "aunt" Hedwig helped him escape what he felt would be certain death in the sanatorium. After that, he briefly trained as a singer (abandoned because of his bad lungs) and then took a job as a crime reporter, before turning to writing full-time. [Read more]

Gabriel Josipovici, 'Wittgenstein’s awkward nephew'

New Statesman, 13 January 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Who is Thomas Bernhard?
• Writers: Thomas Bernhard
• Gabriel Josipovici: Why Modernism Matters
• Gabriel Josipovici on the Contemporary British Novel

Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets

Alistair Fowler reviews Don Paterson's new study in the TLS

Don Paterson, Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets: A New Commentary

Alastair Fowler reviews Don Paterson's recent book, Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets: A New Commentary:

Shakespeare’s reputation makes his Sonnets hard to approach. Mountains of critical scholasticism loom: a dozen substantial commentaries, countless books and articles. To add to all that is a daunting challenge. But here is Don Paterson, successful poet, Queen’s Medallist, Forward Prize-winner, who has already written about sonnets. He’ll do a popular book on Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

Poor man, what a commission. He knows it, and keeps apologizing (“let me be the first to say that I consider this theory to be garbage”; “that’s the best I can do”; “for all I know”). His solution is to play to his strength and offer a fiction. He’ll imagine someone teaching a Shakespeare class (“If this were a class I was teaching”), yet ostentatiously distance himself from the professional tutors, the “anoraks” and “cabbalists”. That way he can appropriate anorak opinions without getting ink-stained, advance theories and take them back. [Read more]

Alistair Fowler, 'Don Paterson's Shakespeare'

Times Literary Supplement, 12 January 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Humanity and King Lear
• Hamlet: Play or Novel?
• Shakespeare's Hamlet: Polonious on Conduct