As a brilliant survey of English literature in terms of changing attitudes towards country and city, Williams' highly-acclaimed study reveals the shifting images and associations between these two traditional poles of life throughout the major developmental periods of English culture.

    Nowhere is this more apparent than in the writings of Marcel Duchamp, who fashioned some of the more joyous and ingenious couplings and uncouplings in modern art. This collection beings together two essential interviews and two statements about his art that underscore the serious side of Duchamp. But most of the book is made up of his experimental writings, which he called ”Texticles,” the long and extraordinary notes he wrote for The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Eben (also known as The Large Glass), and the outrageous puns and alter-ego he constructed for his female self, Rrose Sélavy (”Eros, c’est la vie” or “arouser la vie”—“drink it up”; “celebrate life”). Wacky, perverse, deliberately frustrating, these entertaining notes are basic for understanding one of the twentieth century’s most provocative artists, a figure whose influence on the contemporary scene has never been stronger.

    Using the popular literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries-including captivity narratives, the Daniel Boone tales, and the writings of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville-Slotkin traces the full development of this myth.

    . . not only a poetics of reading . . . but a much more difficult achievement, an erotics of reading . . . . Like filings which gather to form a figure in a magnetic field, the parts and pieces here do come together, determined to affirm the pleasure we must take in our reading as against the indifference of (mere) knowledge." --Richard Howard

    

    This book is a record of those seminars, which took the form of informal discussions between Borges, Norman Thomas di Giovanni--his editor and translator, Frank MacShane--then head of the writing program at Columbia, and the students. Borges's prose, poetry, and translations are handled separately and the book is divided accordingly.The prose seminar is based on a line-by-line discussion of one of Borges's most distinctive stories, "The End of the Duel." Borges explains how he wrote the story, his use of local knowledge, and his characteristic method of relating violent events in a precise and ironic way. This close analysis of his methods produces some illuminating observations on the role of the writer and the function of literature.The poetry section begins with some general remarks by Borges on the need for form and structure and moves into a revealing analysis of four of his poems. The final section, on translation, is an exciting discussion of how the art and culture of one country can be "translated" into the language of another.This book is a tribute to the brilliant craftsmanship of one of South America's--indeed, the world's--most distinguished writers and provides valuable insight into his inspiration and his method.

    This collection, published in six individual volumes or in this two-volume edition, presents the finest English literature from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, with introductory matter and extensive annotation by six of the foremost critics and scholars writing today.

    A fully-annotated, two-volume work which presents the major literary achievements of English writers from the medieval period to the twentieth century.

    In this collection of interviews, articles, and editorials, Vladimir Nabokov ranges over his life, art, education, politics, literature, movies, and modern times, among other subjects. Strong Opinions offers his trenchant, witty, and always engaging views on everything from the Russian Revolution to the correct pronunciation of Lolita.

    

    Drawing on his philosophical works, political tracts & personal correspondence it shows how his concern with social problems influenced his concept of state.PrefacedBeginningsPositivity & freedomThe modernization of GermanyThe new era Modern life & social realityThe owl of Minerva & the critical mindThe political economy of modern society Social classes, representation & pluralismThe state: the consciousness of freedomWarThe English Reform Bill: the social problem againHistory: the progress towards the consciousness of freedomEpilogueBibliographyIndex

    The work examines hundreds of related myths and a wide range of Indian texts--Vedic, Puranic, classical, modern, and tribal--centering on the stories of the great ascetic, Siva, and his erotic alter ego, Kama.

    Composer Karlheinz Stockhausen interviewed by Jonathan Cott for Rolling Stone magazine & beyond.

    

    Gadamer's commentaries on Celan's work are explicitly meant for a general audience, and they are further testimony to Celan's growing importance in world literature since the Second World War. Celan's poetry has attracted the attention of many well-known figures, including Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Edmond Jabes, Otto Poggeler, and George Steiner. As Steiner has said, "It will take a long time for our sensibilities to apprehend poetry of these dimensions and this radicality." Gadamer's commentaries will help readers to listen to Celan's poetry, and to become acquainted with his only book-length commentary on a poet, using the best example of Gadamer's thinking on the relationship of philosophy and poetry. This book also contains a translation of Who Am I and Who Are You?, the centerpeice of Gadamer's most important philosophical project since the publication of Truth and Method (1960).

    E. Housman, or as introductions to editions of the classical Greek writers, the Protestant mystics, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Tennyson, Grimm and Andersen, Poe, G. K. Chesterton, Paul Valéry, and others.  Throughout, these prose pieces reveal the same wit and intelligence—as well as the vision—that sparked the brilliance of Auden's poetry.

    But for most readers, her values have been a phenomenon more felt than fully apprehended. In this book, Stuart M. Tave identifies and explains a number of the central concepts across Austen’s novels—examining how words like “odd,” “exertion,” and, of course, “sensibility,” hold the key to understanding the Victorian author’s language of moral values. Tracing the force and function of these words from Sense and Sensibility to Persuasion, Tave invites us to consider the peculiar and subtle ways in which word choice informs the conduct, moral standing, and self-awareness of Austen’s remarkable characters.

    She analyzes the way in which Jane Austen blends ironic criticism with moral affirmation through her complex and little-understood management of the narrative point of view. She demonstrates that the reader takes a journey of perception similar to that of the central characters in the novels, and that the correct interpretation of events is often unclear until well after the fact, despite the seeming aid of an apparently unbiased, omniscient narrator.Professor Nardin applies this general viewpoint on Jane Austen's art in her examination of the way Jane Austen uses ideas about propriety in her six novels. For Jane Austen, a person's social behavior--the code of propriety by which he lives--is the external manifestation of his internal moral character. What is the relationship between the conventionally accepted rules of propriety by which the gentry of Jane Austen's era regulated their lives and a morally valid standard of social behavior? This is an important question throughout Jane Austen's work. Those Elegant Decorums is a detailed study of the answers Jane Austen suggests in each novel.

    These essays represent the full range of Dodds' literary and philosophical interests, and his ability to combine profound scholarship with the lucid humanity of a teacher convinced of the value of Greek studies to the modern world.

    

    Maynard Solomon, through his selections and critical introductions, shows connections between the arts and society, between imagination nd history, and between art and revolution. He selects from thirty-six authors to reveal the range of opinion from dogma to heresy, beginning with excerpts from the works of Marx and Engels that are pertinent to an understanding of Marxist philosophy. The book traverses a wide range of subjects from the origins of art to the nature of creativity, the aesthetic experience, the dialectics of consciousness, the psychology of art, and the evolution of art forms. The sources of art in ritual, in the labor process, in the play drive, and in social conflict are explored.

    Shunned in his time yet later idolized by the surrealists, he is now recognized as a precocious genius for his evil masterpiece, "The Songs Of Maldoror. "Nightmare Culture is a crucial investigation into both the myth and reality of Lautreamont's brief existence and, in particular, the literary legacy and cult influence of "The Songs Of Maldoror.