Mapping Space in Fiction

Aashish Kaul on Joseph Frank's 1945 study

Nora and James Joyce

From Aashish Kaul (3:AM Magazine):

As Joseph Frank points out in his early study from 1945, Spatial Form in Modern Literature, Joyce, in Ulysses, works with the assumption that his readers are Dubliners, intimately acquainted with Dublin life and the personal history of his characters, thereby allowing him to refrain from giving any direct information about them; information that, contrary to his intentions, would have betrayed the presence of an omniscient author. What Joyce does, instead, is to present the elements of his narrative in fragments, as they are thrown out unexplained in the course of casual conversations, or as they lie embedded in the various strata of symbolic reference, allusions to Dublin life, history, and the external events of the twenty-four hours during which the novel takes place. The factual background, which otherwise is so conveniently summarized for the reader, must be reconstructed in this case from fragments, sometimes hundreds of pages apart, scattered through the book. As a result, Frank argues, the reader is forced to read Ulysses in the manner he reads modern poetry – continually fitting fragments together and keeping allusions in mind until, by reflexive reference, he can link them to their complements. Indeed Joyce himself, although his model was Aristotle, says as much of Ulysses in a letter to Ezra Pound of 9 April 1917: ‘I am doing it, as Aristotle would say – by different means in different parts.’ [Read More]

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time
• Dostoyevsky's Demons: Political Activists
• Byatt on Dostoyevsky and Execution
• McGrath on Coetzee's Master of Petersburg
• Dostoyevsky on Politics and Personal Vanity

Why Walking Helps Us Think

Nabokov, Joyce, Woolf and the science of walking

Photograph: Nick Walton

From Ferris Jabr (New Yorker) (thanks to Emily Blewitt for the link):

In Vogue’s 1969 Christmas issue, Vladimir Nabokov offered some advice for teaching James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” He drew a charming one himself. Several decades later, a Boston College English professor named Joseph Nugent and his colleagues put together an annotated Google map that shadows Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom step by step. The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, as well as students at the Georgia Institute of Technology, have similarly reconstructed the paths of the London amblers in “Mrs. Dalloway.”

Such maps clarify how much these novels depend on a curious link between mind and feet. Joyce and Woolf were writers who transformed the quicksilver of consciousness into paper and ink. To accomplish this, they sent characters on walks about town. As Mrs. Dalloway walks, she does not merely perceive the city around her. Rather, she dips in and out of her past, remolding London into a highly textured mental landscape, “making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh.”

Since at least the time of peripatetic Greek philosophers, many other writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing. (In fact, Adam Gopnik wrote about walking in The New Yorker just two weeks ago.) “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” Henry David Thoreau penned in his journal. “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” Thomas DeQuincey has calculated that William Wordsworth—whose poetry is filled with tramps up mountains, through forests, and along public roads—walked as many as a hundred and eighty thousand miles in his lifetime, which comes to an average of six and a half miles a day starting from age five.

What is it about walking, in particular, that makes it so amenable to thinking and writing? The answer begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the muscles but to all the organs—including the brain. Many experiments have shown that after or during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better on tests of memory and attention. Walking on a regular basis also promotes new connections between brain cells, staves off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume of the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), and elevates levels of molecules that both stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Will Self: Obsessed with Walking
• Will Self, Walking to Hollywood
• Will Self: Walking is Political
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker
• Granta Interview: Nick Papadimitriou

Cormac McCarthy's 'Venomous Fiction'

From a 1992 interview with the American writer

Cormac McCarthy

From Richard B. Woodward (New York Times):

" You know about Mojave rattlesnakes?" Cormac McCarthy asks. The question has come up over lunch in Mesilla, N.M., because the hermitic author, who may be the best unknown novelist in America, wants to steer conversation away from himself, and he seems to think that a story about a recent trip he took near the Texas-Mexico border will offer some camouflage. A writer who renders the brutal actions of men in excruciating detail, seldom applying the anesthetic of psychology, McCarthy would much rather orate than confide. And he is the sort of silver-tongued raconteur who relishes peculiar sidetracks; he leans over his plate and fairly croons the particulars in his soft Tennessee accent.

"Mojave rattlesnakes have a neurotoxic poison, almost like a cobra's," he explains, giving a natural-history lesson on the animal's two color phases and its map of distribution in the West. He had come upon the creature while traveling along an empty road in his 1978 Ford pickup near Big Bend National Park. McCarthy doesn't write about places he hasn't visited, and he has made dozens of similar scouting forays to Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and across the Rio Grande into Chihuahua, Sonora and Coahuila. The vast blankness of the Southwest desert served as a metaphor for the nihilistic violence in his last novel, "Blood Meridian," published in 1985. And this unpopulated, scuffed-up terrain again dominates the background in "All the Pretty Horses," which will appear next month from Knopf.

Text: "It's very interesting to see an animal out in the wild that can kill you graveyard dead," he says with a smile. "The only thing I had seen that answered that description was a grizzly bear in Alaska. And that's an odd feeling, because there's no fence, and you know that after he gets tired of chasing marmots he's going to move in some other direction, which could be yours."

Keeping a respectful distance from the rattlesnake, poking it with a stick, he coaxed it into the grass and drove off. Two park rangers he met later that day seemed reluctant to discuss lethal vipers among the backpackers. But another, clearly McCarthy's kind of man, put the matter in perspective. "We don't know how dangerous they are," he said. "We've never had anyone bitten. We just assume you wouldn't survive."

Finished off with one of his twinkly-eyed laughs, this mealtime anecdote has a more jocular tone than McCarthy's venomous fiction, but the same elements are there. The tense encounter in a forbidding landscape, the dark humor in the face of facts, the good chance of a painful quietus. Each of his five previous novels has been marked by intense natural observation, a kind of morbid realism. His characters are often outcasts -- destitute or criminals, or both. Homeless or squatting in hovels without electricity, they scrape by in the backwoods of East Tennessee or on horseback in the dry, vacant spaces of the desert. Death, which announces itself often, reaches down from the open sky, abruptly, with a slashed throat or a bullet in the face. The abyss opens up at any misstep.

McCarthy appreciates wildness -- in animals, landscapes and people -- and although he is a well-born, well-spoken, well-read man of 58 years, he has spent most of his adult life outside the ring of the campfire. It would be hard to think of a major American writer who has participated less in literary life. He has never taught or written journalism, given readings, blurbed a book, granted an interview. None of his novels have sold more than 5,000 copies in hardcover. For most of his career, he did not even have an agent.

But among a small fraternity of writers and academics, McCarthy has a standing second to none, far out of proportion to his name recognition or sales. A cult figure with a reputation as a writer's writer, especially in the South and in England, McCarthy has sometimes been compared with Joyce and Faulkner. Saul Bellow, who sat on the committee that in 1981 awarded him a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius grant, exclaims over his "absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences." Says the historian and novelist Shelby Foote: "McCarthy is the one writer younger than myself who has excited me. I told the MacArthur people that he would be honoring them as much as they were honoring him." [Read More]

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Will Cormac McCarthy win the Nobel Prize for Literature?
• Pen, pencil or typewriter?
• Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road
• Picador 40th Anniversary Series
• David Foster Wallace's Annotated Books

Djuna Barnes's Nightwood: The World and the Politics of Peace

A new publication from Bloomsbury

Bonnie Roos, Djuna Barnes's Nightwood: The World and the Politics of Peace

Bloomsbury publishes a new title by Bonnie Roos:

Ranging over depression-era politics, the failures of the League of Nations, popular journalism and the Modernist culture exemplified by such writers as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, this is a comprehensive exploration of the historical contexts of Djuna Barnes's masterpiece, Nightwood.

In Djuna Barnes's Nightwood: 'The World' and the Politics of Peace, Bonnie Roos reads Barnes's novel against the backdrop of Herbert Bayard Swope's popular New York newspaper The World to demonstrate the ways in which the novel wrestles with such contemporaneous issues as the Great Depression and its political fallout, the failures of the League of Nations and the collapse of peace between the two World Wars. Roos argues that Nightwood allegorizes the role of liberal newspapers - epitomised by the sensationalism of The World - in driving a US policy that hastened the arrival of war. [Read More]

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Djuna Barnes, stunt journalist
• Henrietta Alice Metcalf: Performing Arts Photographic Collection
• Siri Hustvedt on Djuna Barnes and Nightwood
• David Cronenberg's Literary Influences

Will Self on Reading in the 21st Century

An interview with BBC Newsnight

[Source]

Find Will Self on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Will Self
• Roth and the fate of the Great American Novel
• Paul Auster: Why Roth is wrong about the novel
• Will Self on Literature and Visual Arts
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers

Brian Evenson on Samuel Beckett's Molloy

An interview with Electric Literature

Samuel Beckett

From Electric Literature:

Colin Winnette: What motivated this recommendation?

Brian Evenson: It’s a book I’m very fond of, and I tend to think contemporary American fiction would be more interesting if more writers knew Molloy.I tend to think contemporary American fiction would be more interesting if more writers knew Molloy.

I think it’s also a very funny book (though weird humor sometimes) and has some amazing sentences.

CW: How did you first encounter this book? What was your initial reaction, if you can remember?

BE: At the end of my senior year in high school, we had to read Edward Albee’s play Zoo Story for class. In the note in the textbook for that play, it said that if you’d liked Albee you’d probably also like Samuel Beckett. There was a little used bookstore in an industrial area in Provo, Utah and I ended up picking up Beckett’s Endgame there for a dollar. I loved it—still my favorite Beckett play—and that ended up leading me to Beckett’s trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable). I like all three of those books, but Molloy was the one that really blew me away. I was at once intrigued by it and felt like I was missing a lot. I also think that the fact that the first section is just two paragraphs (one a couple of pages long and one about 80 pages long) kept me going: I didn’t feel like I could stop reading until I’d reached the end of a paragraph, and that made for a very strange, anxious experience. I also think its ability to juxtapose two narratives and still work as a whole is really admirable. It was really different than anything else I’d ever read, which may be what kept me going, but I think also when the narrative switches from Molloy to Moran that did something for me and I wanted to keep reading to see how the two narratives would or wouldn’t come together.

CW: What’s your sense of how the Moran section (part II) interacts with the Molloy section (part I)? What’s revealed/complicated?

BE: Well, it’s a discontinuous juxtaposition, one that seems like it’s structured so that the second part will resolve the first part. There are all sorts of gestures made towards that in things said in the Moran section, but as it progresses you begin to realize it’s not going to actually sew up or resolve anything, at least not completely. Instead, it’s almost as if Moran is going through a kind of “Becoming-Molloy” (though that too is discontinuous and not completely parallel). Very little is accomplished by Moran (apart from a death he’s not sure he understands); he returns to where he started from, but that place has fallen apart in his absence just as he too has fallen apart in being absent. And of course the way it ends calls into question everything about the narrative itself and about narrative in general.

CW: Was the connection to Albee profitable (other than motivating you to discover Beckett)?

BE: Not really. I liked Zoo Story and I like the other Albee plays I’ve read or seen, but I feel that Beckett’s a different sort of animal than Albee. But sure, they’re animals that are pretty close evolutionarily even if they’re not the same. I think whoever wrote the notes for the anthology had read Martin Esslin’s The Theater of the Absurd and saw both Beckett and Albee as being part of that tradition. And in any case, I owe Albee a debt for not only changing my idea of what drama could be when I was in high school but also for leading me indirectly to Beckett.

CW: Will you talk a little about Beckett’s apparent obsession with decay, with aging, rot, even mental/psychological decay? Molloy isn’t the only Beckett work that leads you in one direction, only to lose its narrative “trajectory” to decay and stagnance.

BE: I think it’s more than apparent. It has something to do with Beckett’s philosophical notion that we move from the cradle to the grave, that that’s the only direction that anything moves, at least anything organic. As he suggests in Waiting for Godot: We “give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” We are left each day with a little less–though moments in his work ironize this or call it into question. Beckett’s about the night, but he’s also about the brief gleam. Beckett’s about the night, but he’s also about the brief gleam.

CW: How might writers knowing about Molloy make contemporary American fiction more interesting?

BE: I guess what I think—and I’ve talked about this elsewhere—is that there are two very different strands of innovation in American fiction. One can be traced, roughly, back to Joyce (Ulysses in particular) and involves a kind of excessive maximalism and lots of pyrotechnics. David Foster Wallace, for instance (who I admire a lot). There’s a great deal to be admired in that strand, and a lot to be learned from it, but at the same time I feel sometimes like those writers seem like they want to cram the whole world into a paper bag. It’s impressive, in a way, to watch that cramming take place, but what you have in the end often strikes me as being a little too proud of itself, wanting a little too much attention for being virtuosic. The other strand for me is traced back to Beckett and Kafka, who manage to do amazing things with language but also aren’t really interested in being impressive. Those works don’t say “Look at me”; instead they get down to the very serious business of figuring something out, of following and pursuing a line, and then don’t mind cutting out the noise of other things that don’t feel relevant. They’re modest in one way, incisive and deadly in another. I tend to think if more American writers ended up reading Beckett, and Molloy in particular, it’d shift the American sense of what experiment is. I can see it in contemporary French literature–Beckett has had a very positive effect. And then of course there are the non-innovative/non-experimental realms of literature. I think realist writers in particular should be confronted with Molloy’s lack of tidiness. [Read More]

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• On Samuel Beckett's Molloy
• Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui: The Trilogy
• Working with Beckett's Manuscripts
• Peter Gay on Beckett and Modernism

Did James Joyce have Syphilis?

A new history of Ulysses makes a controversial claim about its author

James Joyce

From Hector Tobar (Los Angeles Times):

James Joyce famously struggled with eye problems for much of his life, ending up nearly blind. Of his declining vision, Joyce said in 1931: “I deserve all this on account of my many iniquities.” According to a new book by a Harvard scholar, that statement was Joyce’s thinly veiled admission that he had contracted, and suffered for decades, with a sexually transmitted disease.

Kevin Birmingham, a lecturer in history and literature at Harvard, uncovered new evidence that Joyce suffered from syphilis and wrote about it in “The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses,” his new history of the controversy over the publication of the Irish author’s masterpiece.

Birmingham’s book covers much ground related to Joyce’s career, and the circle of writers, editor, publishers and friends who helped bring “Ulysses” to print and defended it against legal attacks. The Guardian interviewed Birmingham on the writer’s maladies and Birmingham’s extensive efforts to identify what they were.

“The Harvard scholar decided to ‘turn over every stone’ to find out what might have caused Joyce's deteriorating vision, compiling references to every symptom and treatment the author had,” the Guardian reported. “One item in particular sparked his curiosity: Joyce's reference in two separate 1928 letters to the injections of arsenic and phosphorous he was receiving.”

Joyce, Birmingham concluded, was receiving injections of galyl, a drug that was only used to treat syphilis. (The current treatment for the disease, penicillin, only came into to widespread use in the 1940s). Joyce had contracted the disease as early as 1907. [Read More]

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Re Joyce
• James Joyce: Political Controversialist
• James Joyce, The Cats of Copenhagen
• Fan Letters: Famous Authors to Famous Authors
• Reading Finnegans Wake

Famous Writers’ Sleeping Habits

A visualisation of rising times set against literary productivity

Click for source

From Brain Pickings (thanks to Michael John Goodman for the link):

Over the years, in my endless fascination with daily routines, I found myself especially intrigued by successful writers’ sleep habits — after all, it’s been argued that “sleep is the best (and easiest) creative aphrodisiac” and science tells us that it impacts everything from our moods to our brain development to our every waking moment. I found myself wondering whether there might be a correlation between sleep habits and literary productivity. The challenge, of course, is that data on each of these variables is hard to find, hard to quantify, or both. So I turned to Italian information designer Giorgia Lupi and her team at Accurat — who make masterful visualizations of cultural phenomena seemingly impossible to quantify — and, together, we set out to explore whether it might be possible to visualize such a correlation.

First, I handed them my notes on writers’ wake-up times, amassed over years of reading biographies, interviews, journals, and other materials. Many came from two books — Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey and Odd Type Writers: From Joyce and Dickens to Wharton and Welty, the Obsessive Habits and Quirky Techniques of Great Authors by Celia Blue Johnson — as well as from the Paris Review interviews and various collections of diaries and letters.

We ended up with a roster of thirty-seven writers for whom wake-up times were available — this became the base data set, around which we set out to quantify, then visualize, the literary productivity of each author. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Homes of German Philosophers
• Nietzsche's Daily Habits
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers
• Odd Type Writers
• Marcel Proust's Obituary

50 Tough Books for Extreme Readers

Why read a 'difficult' book?

Alexander Deineka, 'Young Woman Reading' (1934)

Emily Temple (Flavorwire) has compiled a list of '50 Incredibly Tough Books for Extreme Readers'. Their toughness varies from the sheer bulk of the volume (eg. Tolstoy's War and Peace and Stein's The Making of Americans), to their stylistic virtuosity (Finnegans Wake, anyone?). But despite their daunting reputations, there can be something special about reading a 'difficult' book.

Such novels can prompt a unique kind of reader interaction, making us rethink the way we look at the world around us. These are often the sort of books that aim to elevate the everyday, or shed light on issues that society tends to overlook. What we find 'tough' or 'challenging' is often simply unfamiliar, or different to what we might usually expect. What turns our noses to the air in a modernist novel is often its attempt to capture life as it really is: a character speaking in a local dialect, or the disjointed structure of a daydream. In these and other cases, what is difficult is not the book itself, but our decision as readers to go with it.

There are books that we consume, and sometimes there are books that consume us - novels, poems and plays which perpetually pull us back to them. As the filmmaker David Cronenberg once said of Burroughs' Naked Lunch, 'You find your favorite parts, like the I Ching. You look in it when you need it, and you find something there.' Temple has charted a wonderful selection of just this kind of book. Here are just a few of them:

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes (Amazon: US | UK)
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy (Amazon: US | UK)
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville (Amazon: US | UK)
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace (Amazon: US | UK)
J R, William Gaddis (Amazon: US | UK)
Finnegans Wake, James Joyce (Amazon: US | UK)
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (Amazon: US | UK)
In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust (Amazon: US | UK)
Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs (Amazon: US | UK)
To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf (Amazon: US | UK)
The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein (Amazon: US | UK)
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (Amazon: US | UK)
2666, Roberto Bolaño (Amazon: US | UK)
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (Amazon: US | UK)
Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon (Amazon: US | UK)
Underworld, Don DeLillo (Amazon: US | UK)
The Unfortunates, B.S. Johnson (Amazon: US | UK)
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, Lydia Davis (Amazon: US | UK)
The Tunnel, William Gass (Amazon: US | UK)
Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (Amazon: US | UK)
The Castle, Franz Kafka (Amazon: US | UK)
The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Amazon: US | UK)

[Read the Full List]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Is Modernism Boring?
• 'A House of Life': Anthony Burgess on James Joyce
• Man Ray: Photographs of Virginia Woolf
• Tolstoy: The Greatest Writer of all Time?
• Cronenberg: 'Imagination is dangerous'

The Social Network – Joyce, MacGreevy and Beckett in Paris

James Joyce Centre, Dublin · 4 November 2013

James Joyce Centre, Dublin

From the James Joyce Centre:

Independent scholar Sandra Andrea O’Connell will deliver her talk entitled ‘The Social Network – James Joyce, Thomas MacGreevy and Samuel Beckett in Paris’ at the centre on Monday 4th November 2013, 6.30pm. The talk is free but advanced booking is required.

Born in Ulm, Germany, Sandra Andrea O’Connell is an independent scholar, writer and editor on Irish literature and architecture based in Dublin. She received her PhD from the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, where her dissertation took the form of a literary biography on the Irish-Russian poet, publisher and founder of the Europa Press, George Reavey (1906-1976). A book of essays on George Reavey is due for publication with the Lilliput Press, while Sandra has also published essays on Samuel Beckett, Thomas MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, and Thomas Kinsella.

Sandra is editor of the journal Architecture Ireland and has edited three volumes of the RIAI Annual Review, Irish Architecture. She is a founding board-member of Dublin’s architecture gallery darc space at No. 26 North Great George’s Street and curates exhibitions and the monthly talk series ‘Thursday Lunch at darc space’. In 2006, she launched Open House Dublin for the Irish Architecture Foundation, which she curated for seven years. In 2012 Sandra was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Finnegans Wake Reading Groups
• Chinese translation of Finnegans Wake published
• James Joyce, The Cats of Copenhagen
• Reading Finnegans Wake
• New edition of Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake Reading Groups

Groups take anywhere from 6 months to 13 years to finish the book

Photo: Karl Steel

From Rachel Nuwer (smithsonian.com):

James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake has been billed as one of the most difficult works of literature ever written in English, and soon after its publication in 1939, reading groups devoted to tackling the opus began popping up. Today, there are Finnegans Wake groups everywhere from Dublin to Bozeman to Adelaide, and they often last for years.

“We read a passage aloud, discuss until we can discuss no more, and then move on to the next, and have been doing so since 2009,” one group writes on the Finnegans Wake reading group directory. The book is more than 400 pages long, and it’s not unusual for reading groups to spend a full session dissecting just a page or two. In 2010, one group in Boston celebrated the end of the novel with booze and a ritual chant of the novel’s first/last sentence. The members had been working their way through the book for 13 years.

A Los Angles-based reading group, however, had a different approach. It met after hours in a used bookstore every Sunday night at 11 p.m. and barreled through 20 to 40 pages in each session, says the blog Finnegans, Wake! [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Riverrun: Reading Finnegans Wake
• Chinese translation of Finnegans Wake published
• James Joyce, The Cats of Copenhagen
• Reading Finnegans Wake
• New edition of Finnegans Wake
• Anthony Burgess on Finnegans Wake

The Speech-Gesture Complex: Modernism, Theatre, Cinema

A new title from Edinburgh University Press

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From Edinburgh University Press: Places the performative gesture at the point of intersection between literature, theatre and cinema

This study examines the representation of gesture in modernist writing, performance and cinema. Deploying a new theoretical term, ‘the speech-gesture complex’, Anthony Paraskeva identifies a relationship between speech and gesture which is neither exclusively literary nor performative and which, he argues, is fundamental to the aesthetics and politics of modernist authors. In discussions of works by Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Vladimir Nabokov and Samuel Beckett, Paraskeva shows how this relationship is closely informed by their attention to the performed gestures of actors in theatre and cinema.

Key Features

• Provides new close readings of major and neglected work by Kafka, Joyce, James, Lewis, Nabokov and Beckett, revealing their complex relations with both theatre and cinema
• Establishes a new critical-theoretical category, and highlights an unexplored dialogue between Ibsen, Benjamin, Adorno, Griffith, Eisenstein, Chaplin, Brecht, Artaud, Lang, Meyerhold, Duse and Garbo
• Analyses central and neglected modernist texts alongside stage productions, styles of acting, film history and performance theory [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• David Lynch on Surrealist Cinema
• James Joyce and Walter Benjamin
• Sold: Samuel Beckett's Murphy Manuscripts
• Travels in Nihilon: Critchley on Beckett and Adorno

Laura Frost, The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents

A new title from Columbia University Press

Laura Frost, The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents

From Columbia University Press:

Aldous Huxley decried “the horrors of modern ‘pleasure,’” or the proliferation of mass produced, widely accessible entertainment that could degrade or dull the mind. He and his contemporaries, including James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, D. H. Lawrence, and Jean Rhys, sought to radically redefine pleasure, constructing arduous and indirect paths to delight through their notoriously daunting work. Laura Frost follows these experiments in the art of unpleasure, connecting modernism’s signature characteristics, such as irony, allusiveness, and obscurity, to an ambitious attempt to reconfigure bliss.

In The Problem with Pleasure, Frost draws upon a wide variety of materials, linking interwar amusements, such as the talkies, romance novels, the Parisian fragrance Chanel no. 5, and the exotic confection Turkish Delight, to the artistic play of Joyce, Lawrence, Stein, Rhys, and others. She considers pop cultural phenomena and the rise of celebrities such as Rudolph Valentino and Gypsy Rose Lee against contemporary sociological, scientific, and philosophical writings on leisure and desire.

Throughout her study, Frost incorporates recent scholarship on material and visual culture and vernacular modernism, recasting the period’s high/low, elite/popular divides and formal strategies as efforts to regulate sensual and cerebral experience. Capturing the challenging tensions between these artists’ commitment to innovation and the stimulating amusements they denounced yet deployed in their writing, Frost calls attention to the central role of pleasure in shaping interwar culture. [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Brian Boyd, Stalking Nabokov
• David Foster Wallace: Fate, Time and Language
• Alain Badiou, The Incident at Antioch
• Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

Riverrun: Reading Finnegans Wake

Alan O’Riordan on Olwen Fouéré’s Riverrun

Olwen Fouéré

From the Irish Examiner:

There are two ways to read Finnegans Wake: aloud, letting the words wash over you, or with slow methodical parsing, going word-by-word, painstakingly teasing out the implications and associations of Joyce’s polyglot puns and neologisms.

Actually, you could just as easily argue there is only one way to read Finnegans Wake: by combining these two methods. It’s a daunting prospect; and little wonder that, while Ulysses is the work of Joyce’s that many pretend to have read, most are happy to plead ignorance of his final novel.

Luckily for that large cohort, there comes Olwen Fouéré’s Riverrun. Her adaptation and performance follows Anna Livia Plurabelle’s final meditation on life at the closing of the book, a voice that embodies the River Liffey flowing out of time in a death aria that is nonetheless timeless renewal, taking the reader, or in this case the listener, back to the start of the book, via “Howth Castle and environs”. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Chinese translation of Finnegans Wake published
• James Joyce, The Cats of Copenhagen
• Reading Finnegans Wake
• New edition of Finnegans Wake
• Anthony Burgess on Finnegans Wake

Odd Type Writers

Celia Blue Johnson on writers' habits

Gertrude Stein

Celia Blue Johnson shares research she has conducted for her new book, Odd Type Writers:

Poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller was very particular about his writing process. He worked mostly at night and hung red curtains in his study so sunlight never illuminated the room. If he grew tired, Schiller would dip his feet in cold water so that he could stay awake and write. His most peculiar habit, however, involved fruit. He kept a drawer full of rotten apples in his study. The spoiled food created a stench that Schiller's friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe found repugnant. However, according to Schiller's wife, he "could not live or work without" the awful aroma.

[...]

Gertrude Stein found inspiration in the driver's seat of her Model T Ford. Stein would wait in the car while her partner, Alice B. Toklas, ran errands. She jotted down poetry and prose on scraps of paper while busy Parisian traffic zipped by. Stein owned two Fords in her lifetime: the first she dubbed Auntie after a relative who "behaved fairly well most of the time if she was properly flattered," and the second, which lacked any bells and whistles, was named Godiva, after the naked heroine.

As a young writer Virginia Woolf preferred to stand while she wrote. Her desk was three and a half feet tall. Quentin Bell, Woolf's nephew, concluded that the habit was spurred by sibling rivalry. Woolf's sister Vanessa was an artist who painted at an easel. Bell noted, "This led Virginia to feel that her own pursuit might appear less arduous than that of her sister unless she set matters on a footing of equality." Eventually Woolf transitioned from standing to sitting.

In his late twenties, James Joyce wore a white coat while he worked. He'd put it on, climb into bed, and compose his work with a blue pencil. His sister Eileen noted that the coat "gave a kind of white light" that helped him see the page. Joyce battled eye diseases throughout his life. As his sight worsened, the resourceful author magnified his entire creative process, writing intricate sentences with colored crayons on large pieces of cardboard. [Read More]

Those interested in writer routines and eccentricities might also be tempted by Mason Currey's fascinating collection, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers
• David Lynch on Having a Setup
• Ten Rules for Writing Fiction
• Writers' Rooms: Siri Hustvedt
• A Day in the Life of Arthur Schopenhauer

For Sale: Samuel Beckett's Murphy Manuscripts

Six handwritten notebooks, containing draft of Murphy, to be sold at Sotheby’s in London

A scan from Samuel Beckett's Murphy manuscripts. Photograph: Sotheby’s/PA Wire

From Eoin Burke-Kennedy (The Irish Times) (thanks to Scott Eric Hamilton for drawing my attention to the article):

Six doodle-strewn notebooks, containing the handwritten draft of Samuel Beckett’s first published novel, Murphy, are to be auctioned at Sotheby’s in London.

The Murphy draft provides a rare insight into the writer’s early artistic vision and is, arguably, the most significant Beckett manuscript to come under the hammer since the author’s death in 1989.

While scholars have known of its existence, very few have had a chance to view the text as it has been held in private hands until now. It is the star lot in Sotheby’s auction of rare books and manuscripts on July 10th next, and has a guide price of £800,000 - £1.2 million (€937,000 - €1.4 million). [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Doodles by Famous Writers
• Samuel Beckett's Doodles
• Watt: Samuel Beckett's Wartime Manuscripts
• Samuel Beckett Letters at Sotheby's

Gisèle Freund: Writer Portraits

An online gallery of prominent twentieth-century authors and poets

Hermann Hesse, Montagnlia, 1962

James Joyce with grandson, Paris, 1938.

Walter Benjamin, Paris, 1938

Virginia Woolf smoking, London, 1939

T. S. Eliot, London, 1939

Victoria Ocampo, Paris, 1939

Stefan Zweig, 1939

Samuel Beckett, Paris, 1964

Iris Murdoch, Oxford, 1959

Marcel Duchamp, Paris, 1939

Marguerite Duras, Paris, 1965

André Malraux, Paris, 1935

Paul Celan, 1970

Sylvia Beach, Paris, 1938

You can find more writer portraits on Gisèle Freund's official website [See More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Photographs of Maurice Blanchot
• Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg
• Man Ray: Photographs of Virginia Woolf
• Ludwig Wittgenstein's Photography
• Susan Sontag, On Photography
• John Minihan on Samuel Beckett

Charlotte Mandell on Translating Blanchot

A 2005 interview by Ready Steady Book

Photograph: E. E. Pridgeon

Mark Thwaite of Ready Steady Book talks to Charlotte Mandell about translating the French writer and theorist Maurice Blanchot:

I first came across your name as a translator of the work of Maurice Blanchot. What first got you interested in Blanchot?

Fate. My friend Pierre Joris, who translated Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community, was asked by Helen Tartar (then editor-in-chief at Stanford University Press) to translate La part du feu. He didn’t have the time, so he recommended me. I sent in a sample chapter – I was only 24 then and the only book-length work I’d translated was a book of poems, Le feu l’ombre, by the French poet Jean-Paul Auxeméry. Helen liked the straightforwardness of my translation, the fact that it didn’t use any acadamese – I tried to translate Blanchot as simply and as honestly as I could.

Do you find the close reading required to translate a work has helped you to understand Blanchot more clearly than you would otherwise have done?

Definitely, yes. I feel I’ve never really “read” a work until I’ve translated it. I also make it a rule never to read too far ahead in the book I’m translating – that way everything is fresh and new, and I can’t form any preconceived notions about what will come next. I figure the author never had the luxury of reading his book beforehand, so why should I? (In the case of Blanchot it’s a little different – I’d already read many of his books in French when I was a student in Paris.)

Do you think "the common reader" can get much out of Blanchot or should he be left to academics?

Reading Blanchot is a little like watching someone think. You have to have patience, since his essays move by nuance and suggestion, and come to focus slowly. English readers – Americans especially – are used to being fed information; in the case of an essay, they’re used to the conventional statement-exposition-conclusion format. The nice thing about Blanchot (and the thing a lot of people find exasperating about him) is that he doesn’t follow that formula, or any formula for that matter. Often no conclusion is reached. The subject is examined, and questioned, and looked at from different angles, but never really resolved. I like that a lot – it’s sort of like reading poetry. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Christopher Fynsk on Maurice Blanchot
• Photographs of Maurice Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot: Thomas Reads a Book
• Maurice Blanchot on Giacometti and Writing
• Maurice Blanchot: Corrected Proofs
• Michel Foucault on Maurice Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot and Romanticism
• Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

Fan Letters: Famous Authors to Famous Authors

Letters from Joyce, Gaddis, Woolf, McCullers and others

A young James Joyce (1902)

Flavorwire has posted a fan letter written by James Joyce to the playwright Henrik Ibsen (link via Johann Gregory):

Honoured Sir,

I write to you to give you greeting on your seventy-third birthday and to join my voice to those of your well-wishers in all lands. You may remember that shortly after the publication of your latest play ‘When We Dead Awaken’, an appreciation of it appeared in one of the English reviews — The Fortnightly Review — over my name. I know that you have seen it because some short time afterwards Mr. William Archer wrote to me and told me that in a letter he had from you some days before, you had written, ‘I have read or rather spelled out a review in the Fortnightly Review by Mr. James Joyce which is very benevolent and for which I should greatly like to thank the author if only I had sufficient knowledge of the language.’ (My own knowledge of your language is not, as you see, great but I trust you will be able to decipher my meaning.) I can hardly tell you how moved I was by your message. I am a young, a very young man, and perhaps the telling of such tricks of the nerves will make you smile. But I am sure if you go back along your own life to the time when you were an undergraduate at the University as I am, and if you think what it would have meant to you to have earned a word from one who held so high a place in your esteem as you hold in mine, you will understand my feeling. One thing only I regret, namely, that an immature and hasty article should have met your eye, rather than something better and worthier of your praise. There may not have been any wilful stupidity in it, but truly I can say no more. It may annoy you to have your work at the mercy of striplings but I am sure you would prefer even hotheadedness to nerveless and ‘cultured’ paradoxes. [Read More]

The site has also posted letters by William Gaddis (to Don DeLillo), Norman Mailer (to William Styron), Ray Bradbury (to Robert Heinlein), Charles Dickens (to George Eliot), Virginia Woolf (to Olaf Stapledon), W. H. Auden (to James Agee), Carson McCullers (to Henry Miller), George R. R. Martin (to Stan Lee), and William S. Burroughs (to Truman Capote). [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• James Joyce, The Cats of Copenhagen
• James Joyce Centre: New Acquisitions
• James Joyce Manuscripts Online
• James Joyce and Walter Benjamin
• Literary Mentorships: James Joyce and Samuel Beckett
• Christopher Hitchens on James Joyce's Ulysses

Thomas Pynchon, Philosophy, Ethics

3:AM Magazine publishes an essay by Martin Paul Eve

From Martin Paul Eve (3:AM Magazine):

Thomas Pynchon ranks among the most critically acclaimed American authors of the past fifty years; certainly so when viewed in terms of academic scholarship. He has two academic journals devoted solely to his work and influence (Pynchon Notes and Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon), over twenty monographs exploring his writing and, since 1978, there have been 23 doctorates awarded in the United Kingdom alone on, or in major part concerning, his fiction. This trend shows no sign of stopping; with apologies to the well-known formulation of James Joyce, almost a century ago, it seems as though Thomas Pynchon will continue to keep the professors busy.

The reasons for this critical proliferation are not hard to fathom. Pynchon is a man of mystery, refusing to be photographed or interviewed, who has published some of the finest works of post-war literature, particularly V., Gravity’s Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49 and Mason & Dixon. His novels have most frequently been type-cast as exemplary of the postmodern – saturated as they are with paranoia, indeterminacy and failed quest-narratives – but this seriously underplays the scale of Pynchon’s writing. Consider that Pynchon is also a writer of enormous historical scope. V. spans the defining moments of crisis in the twentieth century, Gravity’s Rainbow re-casts the sixties in terms of World War II and the history of Calvinism (including a flashback to a Mauritian Dodo hunt) while Mason & Dixon explores the interrelation of its eponymous protagonists with the Age of Reason and slavery in America. If this weren’t enough, his novels are interdisciplinary, incorporating metaphors from science and technology, cartography, popular culture, cartoons, aural puns, mathematical in-jokes, outrageous character names (and sexual practices) and sublime prose poetry.

More important than any of these preceding aspects, though, is the fact that Pynchon is a politically engaged, ethical writer. Gravity’s Rainbow is not just a dense, postmodern sprawl, but instead makes one of its central observations on the fact that the evil of mankind, parallel to nature, “does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation”, a spatio-temporal transposition to a new setting, persisting Beyond the Zero of any Pavlovian deconditioning, and always collecting around centres of power, embodied by the novel’s final, America-bound, transatlantic V-2/ICBM. Through this impossible moment, Pynchon highlights that behind twentieth-century America’s technological and economic supremacy lies the dark negotiations of Operation Paperclip and a re-embodiment of the right-wing politics supposedly vanquished in the Second World War. How many of us notice, inscribed upon our antibiotics, the second label, permanently hidden beneath the surface-level, reading “sulfonamide” and “I.G. Farben”? How many of us see, when we watch satellite television, the German technician crying: “Vergeltungswaffe”? [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Thomas Pynchon: Signed Books
• A new Thomas Pynchon novel?
• International Pynchon Week 2013
• Paul Thomas Anderson on Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Trailer for Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Thomas Pynchon: Man of Mystery
• Thomas Pynchon on Objective Reality