Here Benjamin evolves a theory of language as the medium of all creation, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces about Berlin in the 1920s, recalls conversations with Bertolt Brecht, and provides travelogues of various cities, including Moscow under Stalin. He moves seamlessly from literary criticism to autobiography to philosophical-theological speculations, cementing his reputation as one of the greatest and most versatile writers of the twentieth century. Also included is a new preface by Leon Wieseltier that explores Benjamin's continued relevance for our times.

    So says the Marquis de Sade, philosopher and pornographer. His virtuous Justine, who keeps to the rules, is rewarded with rape and humiliation; his Juliette, Justine's triumphantly monstrous antithesis, viciously exploits her sexuality.With brilliance and wit, Angela Carter takes on these outrageous figments of de Sade's extreme imagination and transforms them into symbols of our time: The Hollywood sex goddesses, mothers and daughters, pornography, even the sacred shrines of sex and marriage lie devastatingly exposed before our eyes.Author Bio: Angela Carter (1940-1992) was best known for her subversive short stories, including her most famous collection, The Bloody Chamber. Carter translated the fairy tales of Charles Perrault, and wrote the screenplay for Neil Jordan's 1984 film, The Company of Wolves, based on her short story.

    Joyce's Voices is both a helpful guide through Joyce's complexities, and a brief treatise on the concept of objectivity: the idea that the world can be perceived as a series of reports to our senses. Objectivity, Kenner claims, was a modern invention, and one that the modernists--Joyce foremost among them--found problematic. Accessible and enjoyable, Joyce's Voices is what so much criticism is not: an aid to better understanding--and enjoying more fully--the work of one of the world's greatest writers.

    

    In addition to seven essays on craft, this collection brings together her penetrating and instructive commentaries on a wide variety of individual writers, including Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Willa Cather, Anton Chekhov, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf.

    Many of these were collected in the 1978 volume Where I Live, which is now expanded by noted Williams scholar John S. Bak to include all of Williams’ theater essays, biographical pieces, introductions and reviews. This volume also includes a few occasional pieces, program notes, and a discreet selection of juvenilia such as his 1927 essay published in Smart Set, which answers the question “Can a good wife be a good sport?” Wonderful and candid stories abound in these essays—from erudite observations on the theater to veneration for great actresses. In “Five Fiery Ladies” Williams describes his fascinated, deep appreciation of Vivien Leigh, Geraldine Page, Anna Magnani, Katharine Hepburn, and Elizabeth Taylor, all of whom created roles in stage or film versions of his plays. There are two tributes to his great friend Carson McCullers; reviews of Cocteau’s film Orpheus and of two novels by Paul Bowles; a portrait of Williams’ longtime agent Audrey Wood; a salute to Tallulah Bankhead; a political statement from 1972, “We Are Dissenters Now”; some hilarious stories in response to Elia Kazan’s frequent admonition, “Tennessee, Never Talk to An Actress”; and Williams’ most moving and astute autobiographical essay, “The Man in the Overstuffed Chair.” Theater critic and essayist John Lahr has provided a terrific foreword which sheds further light on Tennessee Williams’ writing process, always fueled by Williams’ self-deprecating humor and his empathy for life’s nonconformists.

    Schapiro's highly lucid arguments, graceful prose, and extraordinary erudition guide readers through a rich variety of fields and issues: the roles in society of the artist and art, of the critic and criticism; the relationships between patron and artist, psychoanalysis and art, and philosophy and art. Adapting critical methods from such wide-ranging fields as anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, biology, and other sciences, Schapiro appraises fundamental semantic terms such as "organic style, " "pictorial style," "field and vehicle, " and "form and content"; he elucidates eclipsed intent in a well-known text by Freud on Leonardo da Vinci, in another by Heidegger on Vincent van Gogh. He reflects on the critical methodology of Bernard Berenson, and on the social philosophy of art in the writings of both Diderot and the nineteenth century French artist/historian Eugene Fromentin. Throughout all of his writings, Meyer Schapiro provides us with a means of ordering our past that is reasoned and passionate, methodical and inventive. In so doing, he revitalizes our faith in the unsurpassed importance of both critical thinking and creative independence.

    Disch—"Angouleme" was first published in 1978 to the intense interest of science fiction readers and the growing community of SF scholars. Recalling Nabokov's commentary on Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Roland Barthes' commentary on Balzac's Sarazine, and Grabinier's reading of The Heart of Hamlet, this book-length essay helped prove the genre worthy of serious investigation. The American Shore is the third in a series of influential critical works by Samuel R. Delany, beginning with The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and Starboard Wine, first published in the late seventies and reissued over the last five years by Wesleyan University Press, which helped win Delany a Pilgrim Award for Science Fiction Scholarship from the Science Fiction Research Association of America. This edition includes the author's corrected text as well as a new introduction by Delany scholar Matthew Cheney.

    Hill uses the learning gathered in a lifetime's study of 17th-century England to carry out a major reassessment of Milton as man, politician, poet and, above all, religious thinker.

    Prof. Garayalde settles many of the puzzles and misinterpretations of his works in a very concise and convincing account both of the Sufis and their work--with which she became familiar long before she approached Borges' own--and of the many parallels in ideas and in actual tales that are included in his work. This is an ideal introduction to Sufi thought for anyone who is searching for a greater understanding of life and him/herself through literature.

    He is credited with almost single-handedly establishing the study of film as an accepted intellectual pursuit. Updating the paperback edition of 1977, Dudley Andrew has written a completely new introduction and provided an additional essay by Jean-Charles Tacchella."

    

    But this is not, Henaff maintains, the only way to see Sade. In this long-awaited translation of a book regarded by many as the best on the subject. Henaff says that Sade should be discussed less for the sensual heat of his writing and more for the larger poetic and economic model his work represents.With unabashed candor, Sade describes bodies in terms not of flesh but of production, use, exchange, and waste. In his writing, this libertine self is unleashed from its constraints, no longer bound by old conceptions of desire and traditions of courtship. Henaff's argument that Sade is a sign of his times -- exposing the courtly facade of a society unable to preserve itself -- reveals dark, disquieting secrets about the direction of civilization. The libertine body, he says, is a child of this new order.

    

    

    Increasingly, literary scholars as well as general readers have joined the ranks of the religious orthodox in reading it. Robert Alter, long in this movement's vanguard, reflects on the paradoxes inherent in considering this great religious work as literature. This book builds on, & in some cases takes issue with, the new wave of literary & bibilical studies to reexamine the elusive, endlessly fascinating texts that have nourished our culture for millenia. While most other books, including Alter's own earlier work, have been devoted to an analysis of the formal poetry & narrative properties of biblical literature, in this book Alter steps back from the analytical catagories to reflect on the general nature of biblical literature. How is one to account for the presence of an impulse as playful & as potentially subversive as literary creation in a body of texts so dedicated to religious purposes? What is the relation between literary imagination & religious values in the bible? In what ways is the bible distinctive as a body of literature. Are there lines of continuity between biblical literature & literature written later & elsewhere? In grappling with these questions, Alter draws on specific examples to make the theoretical issues concretely intelligible.

    

    This mimetic desire, Rene Girard contends, lies at the source of all human disorder and order. In brilliant readings of Dante, Camus, Nietzsche, Dostoevski, Levi-Strauss, Freud, and others, Girard draws out the thesis of mimetic desire -- and ponders its suppression in the West since Plato: The historical mutilation of mimesis ...was no mere oversight, no fortuitous 'error.' Real awareness of mimetic desire threatens the flattering delusion we entertain not only about ourselves as individuals but also about the nature and origin of that collective self we call our society.

    

    They derive from a unified point of view about creativity and about the function of poetry. For the interested reader they can provide a key to the universe of the contemporary poet. In this work, Donald Hall speaks in a conversational way about his poetry and about his poetic wishes, endeavors, failures, and successes.

    

    

    

    An inquiry into the origins, dissemination, and consequences of the modern belief that humans can solve any problem and overcome any difficulty, given time and resources enough.

    

    

    By Analyzing major works of English fiction ranging from Bunyan, Fielding, Scott, and Thackery to Joyce and Beckett, renowned critic Wolfgang Iser here provides a framework for a theory of such literary effects and aesthetic responses.Iser's focus is on the theme of discovery, whereby the reader is given the chance to recognize the deficiencies of his own existence and the suggested solutions to counterbalance them. The content and form of this discovery is the calculated response of the reader--the implied reader. In discovering the expectations and presuppositions that underlie all the perceptions, the reader learns to read himself as he does the text.