Beginning with: "It was Sappho who first called eros 'bittersweet.' No one who has been in love disputes her. What does the word mean?", Carson examines her subject from numerous points of view and styles, transcending the constraints of the scholarly exercise for an evocative and lyrical meditation in the tradition of William Carlos William's Spring and All and William H. Gass's On Being Blue.

    His insights into the works of Dostoyevsky, Mandelstam, Platonov, as well as non-Russian poets Auden, Cavafy and Montale are brilliant. While the Western popularity of many other Third Wavers has been stunted by their inability to write in English, Brodsky consumed the language to attain a "closer proximity" to poets such as Auden. The book, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, opens and closes with revealing autobiographical essay.

    The Greeks made a profound contribution to these questions, yet neither the problems nor the Greek views of them have received the attention they deserve. This updated edition contains a new preface.

    The book also analyzes the complex and problematic films of Brian De Palma, attacks the 1980s fantasy cinema of Lucas and Spielberg, examines the work of women directors, and celebrates the films of Scorcese and Michael Cimino.

    Book by Peary, Danny

    Put simply, this group, which was founded in Paris in 1960, approaches creative writing in a way that still has yet to make its impact in the United States and its creative writing programs. Rather than inspiration, rather than experience, rather than self-expression, the Oulipians viewed imaginative writing as an exercise dominated by what they called "constraints." Quite commonly, they would attempt to write stories, for instance, in which strict rules had to be imposed and followed (for example, Georges Perec's notorious novel A Void, which was written without the use of the letter "e"). While a major contribution to literary theory, Oulipo is perhaps most distinguished as an indispensable guide to writers. "This reader is truly impressed by Motte's capacity to present, in a clear fashion, material that is still new and 'difficult' to most of his readership." (Jean-Jacques Thomas, South Atlantic Review 5-88)

    The Language Poets have extended the Pound-Williams tradition in American writing into new and unexpected territories, ultimately establishing themselves as the most radically experimental avant-garde on the current literary scene. This second edition anthology features the most substantial body of work by the Language Poets now available, as well as with 130 pages of theoretic statements by the poets themselves. The poets represented include Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Clark Coolidge, Susan Howe, and Bernadette Mayer, among many others.

    Crammed with fascinating insights, this generous spree takes us through decades of treats for the imagination: escape to other dimensions, flights to other planets, lost worlds, utopias, mechanical creatures and intelligent aliens. Amusing, intelligent and authoritative, it takes us on a tour through that zone where literature and science engage in an eternal flirtation. Examining the great writers SF has produced, and the images that have become the cultural wallpaper of the present day, this comprehensive expedition is for buffs and tenderfoots alike.

    Works on Paper is the first collection of his writings, twenty-one pieces that juxtapose the world as it is and the world as it is imagined-by artists, poets, historical figures, and ordinary people.“Inventions of Asia”, the first section, deals primarily with how the West reinvents the East (and how the East invents itself): images of India circa 1492 (where Columbus thought he was going); Christian missionaries in sixteenth-century China; Bombay prostitutes as seen by a New York photojournalist; Tibetan theocracy transplanted to the Rockies; a Confucian bureaucrat’s address to crocodiles; the shifting iconography of the “tiger”; looking for an answer to an ancient Chinese poem of questions; how the children of Mao have reinvented Imagism; Kampuchea under Pol Pot.“Extensions of Poetry” explores the ways in which the world affects the imaginations of individual poets (George Oppen, Langston Hughes, Charles Reznikoff, Octavio Paz, Clayton Eshleman) and indeed entire movements, leading at times to unexpected incarnations and transformations. Weinberger ponders such strange conjunctions as Whittaker Chambers and Objectivism, anti-Semitism among American Modernists, bourgeois poets –present-day wards of the academy and the state– confronting the issues of peace, American foreign policy, and The Bomb.An essayist and translator, Eliot Weinberger, founded and edited the literary magazine Montemora (1975-82). His published books include translations of the work of Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, and Homero Aridjis.

    

    A biographical portrait of the jazz alto saxophonist.

    (1740-1814) is unique and paradoxical. He was widely read in the nineteenth century, but his books disappeared almost completely from circulation in the century. Meanwhile the exegesis of Sade poured from the presses of the Western world in a flood of words in which the writer, the novelist, and the exceptional pet disappeared.In France today, J. J. Pauvert, who considers Sade “the greatest French writer,” is publishing a new edition of the complete works with a new introduction by Annie Le Brun. Sade: A Sudden Abyss is the translation of this introduction, which shows Sade as the inventor of an entirely new language through which he fathoms human nature, desire, and relationships of power.In this fresh and authoritative survey of Sade’s work as a whole, Le Brun frees it from such critics as Bataille, Blanchot, Klossowski, and Barthes (who see Sade’s language as a metaphor for history, society, or writing itself). She asks, Where is Sade himself in these texts? What exactly does Sade tell us? What is obscured when Sade’s writing is placed in a “universe of discourse” rather than understood as a manifestation of a life spent in eleven prisons over twenty-seven years? Like a powerful laser beam, her reflections cut through two centuries of intellectual hide-and-seek and let Sade for the first time be seen and read in his own light.Annie Le Brun is a French poet and literary theorist. Her books include Lâchez tout, a critique of the French neofeminist movement; A distance; and Les chateaux de la subversion, a study of the Gothic tradition.

    The first successes of the New Wave by major Cahiers contributors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol focused international attention on the revitalization of French cinema and its relation to film criticism; and in the early 1960s the journal's laudatory critiques of popular American movies were attaining the greatest notoriety.As the lively articles, interviews, and polemical discussions in this volume reveal, the 1960s saw the beginnings of significant new directions in filmmaking and film criticism changes in which the New Wave itself was a major factor. The auteur theory that the journal had championed in the 1950s began to be rethought and revalued. At the same time, along with a reassessment of American film, Cahiers began to embrace new, often oppositional forms of cinema and criticism, culminating in the political and aesthetic radicalism of the ensuing decade.The selections, translated under the supervision of the British Film Institute, are annotated by Jim Hillier, and context is provided in his general introduction and part introductions. For an understanding of the important changes that took place in cinema and film criticism in the 1960s and beyond, this book is essential reading.

    Too many critics have domesticated Dante by separating his theology from his poetics. Freccero argues that to fail to see the convergence of the letter and the spirit, the pilgrim and the poet, is to fail to understand Dante's poetics of conversion. For Dante, body and soul go together and there is no salvation that's purely intellectual, no poetry that is simply literary.The essays that form this book were originally published between 1959 and 1984. They are arranged to follow the order of the Comedy, and they form the perfect companion for a reader of the poem. With these essays assembled for the first time, we can now see Freccero's stature: he is the best contemporary critic of Dante. Freccero is that rare article, a critic of eclectic and not dogmatic persuasion. Throughout Freccero operates on the fundamental premise that there is always an intricate and crucial dialectic at work between Dante the poet and Dante the pilgrim, and that it is this dialectic that makes the work so profoundly dramatic, one of the great novels of the self.Thanks to Freccero we readers have the Comedy whole again. Freccero calls upon medieval philosophy, cosmology, science, theology, and poetics to enable us to traverse Dante's moral landscape without losing our way in the confusions of minute exegeses. In a secular age Freccero enables us to see this poem as what it is, something wholly other than what we might believe or write. In doing so he shows us the most that language can achieve in any age, secular or not.

    the golden age of the European novel discovers a new collective protagonist: youth. It is problematic and restless youth—“strange” characters, as their own creators often say—arising from the downfall of traditional societies. But even more than that, youth is the symbolic figure for European modernity: that sudden mix of great expectations and lost illusions that the bourgeois world learns to “read”, and to accept, as if it were a novel.The Way of the World, with its unique combination of narrative theory and social history, interprets the Bildungsroman as the great cultural mediator of nineteenth-century Europe: a form which explores the many strange compromises between revolution and restoration, economic take-off and aesthetic pleasure, individual autonomy and social normality. This new edition includes an additional final chapter on the collapse of the Bildungsroman in the years around the First World War (a crisis which opened the way for modernist experiments), and a new preface in which the author looks back at The Way of the World in the light of his more recent work.

    More than 200 photos.

    In his analysis of the historical position of Paul Celan's poetry, Lacoue-Labarthe defines the subject as the principle that founds, organizes, and secures both cognition and action—a principle that turned, most violently during the twentieth century, into a figure not only of domination but of the extermination of everything other than itself. This thoroughly universal, abstract, and finally suicidal subject eradicates all experience, save the singularity of this experience of voiding. But what is left, as Paul Celan insisted, is a remainder to the lyric voice alone: Singbarer Rest.Lacoue-Labarthe's detailed analyses of two decisive poems by Celan, "Tübingen, Jänner" and "Todtnauberg"—the one a response to Hölderlin, the other to Heidegger—and his sustained reading of "The Meridian" present Celan's verse of singularity as the movement at and beyond the border of generalizable experience, i.e., as an experience, a traversing of a dangerous field, in which language no longer dominates anything, but rather commemorates the voiding of concepts and the collapse of the constitutive powers of the subject. For Lacoue-Labarthe, poetry after the Shoah, the poetry of bared singularity, is no longer a poetry that would correspond to the concept of the subject—or, for that matter, to the concept of poetry—but is rather the language of the decept. Only by being disappointed of the heroic language of idealistic poetry, and of the mytho-ontological tendencies of philosophy, can Celan's poetry keep open the possibility of another history, another future.

    Gallagher writes of contemporary poets and of the influences on her poetry

    

    Gathers selections from the author's writings about saints, mystics, visionaries, the imagination, sexual ecstasy, the occult, consciousness, and extra-sensory perception.

    The philosopher-man of letters brilliantly reflects on some 16 fellow poets and writers, including Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and William Carols Williams.

    The brief, radiant essays of Classics Revisited discuss sixty key books that are, for Rexroth, “basic documents in the history of the imagination.” Ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Huckleberry Finn, these pieces (each about five pages long) originally appeared in the Saturday Review. Distinguished by Rexroth’s plain, wide-awake style, Classics Revisited presents complex ideas in simple language, energized by the author’s air of talking eye-to-eye with his reader. Elastic, at home in several languages, Rexroth is not bound by East or West; he leaps nimbly from Homer to The Mahabharata, from Lady Murasaki to Stendhal. It is only when we pause for breath that we notice his special affinities: for Casanova, lzaak Walton, Macbeth, Icelandic sagas, classical Japanese poetry. He has read everything. In Sterne, he sees traces of the Buddha; in Fielding, hints of Confucius. “Life may not be optimistic,” Rexroth maintains in his introduction, “but it certainly is comic, and the greatest literature presents man wearing the two conventional masks; the grinning and the weeping faces that decorate theatre prosceniums. What is the face behind the mask? Just a human face––yours or mine. That is the irony of it all––the irony that distinguishes great literature––it is all so ordinary.”

    Received opinion says that there are two Tolstoys, the pre-conversion artist and the post-conversion religious thinker and prophet, but Professor Gustafson argues convincingly that the man is not two, but one.Originally published in 1986.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

    The core of his argument in this essay (and in those that follow) lies in the old opposition between theoria and aesthesis - terms that embody, on the one hand, a linguistic, specifically rhetorical approach to literature and, on the other, a phenomenological, aesthetic, or hermeneutic approach - and all the implications those two modes carry with them. The resistance to theory, says de Man, is a resistance to the use of language about language; it is a resistance to reading, and a resistance to the rhetorical or figurative dimensions of language. The six related essays in The Resistance to Theory were written by de Man in the few years that preceded his death in December 1983. Undertaken to find out why the theoretical enterprise is blind to, or "resists," the radical nature of reading, the essays share not only a theme but also the pedagogical intent that is central to most of his work. These concerns, implicit in the title essay, are openly argued in "The Return to Philology." Each of the remaining essays is devoted to a specific theorist: Michael Riffaterre, Hans Robert Jauss, Walter Benjamin, and Mikhail Bakhtin. The Resistance to Theory also includes a 1983 interview with de Man conducted for Italian radio, and a complete bibliography of his work. Wlad Godzich's foreword tells how de Man's late work was conceived and organized for publication, and discusses some of the basic terms in his discourse."Indispensable. . . . There is resistance to 'theory' and also confusion about its status with reference to both philosophy and criticism. De Man's defense of theory is subtle but uncompromising, and highly personal in its 'aporetic' conclusion."- Frank Kermode, Columbia UniversityPaul de Man was Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. His books include Blindness and Insight (1971; revised edition, Minnesota, 1983), Allegories of Reading ( 1980), and The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984).

    It draws on a profusion of recent documentation and research, some of it hitherto unpublished, and encompasses the whole course of her life. Professor Karlinsky is careful to supply the reader with the necessary context for understanding the work by setting out the historical, political and literary background against which Tsvetaeva's life and literary development evolved. A particular feature of the book is a discussion of Tsvetaeva's relationships with her literary contemporaries, especially Mandelstam, Rilke, Akhmatova, Pasternak, and Mayakovsky, and of her emotional involvement with various men and women that are reflected in her poetry, plays and prose. Interest in Tsvetaeva's work has grown considerably and this important book will be essential reading both to scholars of twentieth-century Russian literature and cultural studies and to all serious students of modern literature.

    Although he was briefly famous in the 1820s, his later and better work was ignored. In 1840, pronounced 'mad', he entered Northampton Asylum, where he remained until his death.Much of Clare's best work was published for the first time in the twentieth century. His descriptions of birds and animals, the seasons and the daily life of an English village just before the Industrial Revolution are among the finest in literature. His 'mad' poems, several of which are included here, are moving expressions of fear, loneliness and alienation. This edition by Merryn and Raymond Williams presents a selection of the poetry and prose exactly as Clare wrote it.

    This is the highly acclaimed fourth volume in the series that began with The Twenties and it is complimented with photographs and journal excerpts of some of the most interesting characters of the decade.

    It is by far the most complete representation of critical theory available, including phenomenologists, structuralists, deconstructionists, Marxists, feminists, reader-response critics, dissenters, and eccentrics, and supplying the background texts necessary of a working understanding of contemporary critical vocabulary and thought.The volume includes selections from Chomsky, Searle, Derrida, Foucault, Frye, Bloom, Kristeva, Fish, Baktin, Berlin, Lacan, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Lukács, Lévi-Strauss, and Blanchot, among many others.

    Professor Lamberton argues that this tradition of reading was to create new demands on subsequent epic and thereby alter permanently the nature of European epic. The Neoplatonist reading was to be decisive in the birth of allegorical epic in late antiquity and forms the background for the next major extension of the epic tradition found in Dante.

    . . . Taken together they have a weight and amplitude of a very high order. . . . What is most impressive about these essays (apart from their range and erudition) is the way that literature and life are so subtly intertwined with each other. The passion for the one is the passion for the other. As it ought to be in criticism, but seldom is."—Mark Le Fanu, The Times (London)"If a critic's job is to puncture pomposity, deflate over-hyped reputations and ferret out true value, then Vizinczey is master of the art."—Publishers Weekly"Stephen Vizinczey comes on like a pistol-packing stranger here to root out corruption and remind us of our ideals. He carries the role off with inspired gusto. His boldness and pugnacity are bracing and can be very funny."—Ray Sawhill, Newsweek "Every piece in the book is good, and many are so good that, after dipping into the middle, I stayed up half of the night, reading with growing amazement and admiration."—Bruce Bebb, Los Angeles Reader

    D. scholarship. It is situated at thecrossroads of contemporary hermeneutics and feminist criticism.

    His detailed study reveals how the great narrative poem explores the relationship that Dante believed to exist between God as creator of the universe and the human being as a creation of God. First Edition Hb (1986): 0-521-32809-8 First Edition Pb (1986): 0-521-30533-0

    His reviews and essays, which he wrote for almost thirty years, were possessed of a voice, vision, and passion as compelling and inspiring as his subject. He was also a poet of distinction—a friend to Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, and John Ashbery. This book presents a sampling of his reviews, essays, and poems, an exemplary collection that exhibits the elegance, lucidity, and timelessness of Denby's writings.The volume includes Denby's reactions to choreography ranging from Martha Graham to George Balanchine to the Rockettes, as well as his reflections on such general topics as dance in film, dance criticism, and meaning in dance.Denby`s writings are presented chronologically, and they not only provide a picture of how his dance theories and reviewing methods evolved but also give an informal history of dance in New York from the late 1930s to the early 1960s. The book—the only collection of Denby's writings currently in print—is an essential resource for students and lovers of dance.

    Baxandall surveys the main themes of their art criticism and describes how their language conditioned their insights into painting.

    An outstanding array of scholars—literary critics, art critics, and historians—reexamines the role of women and their relations with men during the Renaissance. In the process, the contributors enrich the emerging languages of and about women, gender, and sexual difference. Throughout, the essays focus on the structures of Renaissance patriarchy that organized power relations both in the state and in the family. They explore the major conequences of patriarchy for women—their marginalization and lack of identity and power—and the ways in which individual women or groups of women broke, or in some cases deliberately circumvented, the rules that defined them as a secondary sex. Topics covered include representations of women in literature and art, the actual work done by women both inside and outside of the home, and the writings of women themselves. In analyzing the rhetorical strategies that "marginalized" historical and fictional women, these essays counter scholarly and critical traditions that continue to exhibit patriarchal biases.

    A collection of eight critical essays on Shakespeare's play "Hamlet" arranged in chronological order of publication from 1951 to the present.

    The authors compare high and low discourse in a variety of domains, and discover that, in every case, the polarities structure and depend upon each other and, in certain instances, interpenetrate to produce political change.

    But the intensity of his interest in the self, as a focus of exuberant joy as well as sometimes of anguish, both in his poetry and his prose, marks him out as unique even among his contemporaries. In these studies Professor Ong explores some previously unexamined reasons for Hopkins' uniqueness, including unsuspected connections between nineteenth-century sensibility and certain substructures of Christian belief.Hopkins was less interested in self-discovery or self-concept than in what might be called the confrontational or obtrusive self - the 'I, ' ultimately nameless, that each person wakes up to in the morning to find simply there, directly or indirectly present in every moment of consciousness. Hopkins' concern with the self grew out of a nineteenth-century sensibility which was to give birth to modernity and postmodernity, and which in his case as a Jesuit was especially nourished by the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola, concerned at root with the self, free choice, and free self-giving. It was also nourished by the Christian belief in the Three Persons in One God, central to Hopkins' theology courses and personal speculation, and very notable in the Special Exercises. Hopkins appropriated and intensified his Christian beliefs with new nineteenth-century awareness: he writes of the 'selving' in God of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Hopkins' pastoral work, particularly in the confessional, dealing directly with other selves in terms of their free decisions, also gave further force to his preoccupation with the self and freedom. 'What I do, ' he writes, 'is me.'Besides being concerned with the self, the most particular of particulars and the paradigm of all sense of 'presence, ' the Spiritual Exercises in many ways attend to other particularities with an insistence that has drawn lengthy and rather impassioned commentary from the postmodern literary theorist Roland Barthes.Hopkins' distinctive and often precocious attention to the self and freedom puts him theologically far ahead of many of his fellow Catholics and other fellow Victorians, and gives him his permanent relevance to the modern and postmodern world.

    Her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, a classic in the African-American canon, depicts a woman's struggle for self-empowerment. This work takes a critical look at Hurston's work and its influence on contemporary themes, such as race and gender in American society.

    Classic works such as Kubla Khan have taken their place among the most accomplished poems written in the English language. This title offers a selection of contemporary critical commentary on the author.

    Ernest Sturm is Professor of French at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

    The book includes pieces on major works such as Lord Weary's Castle, Life Studies, For the Union Dead, Skunk Hour, Notebook, the sonnets of 1969-73 as well as four essays devoted to Lowell's last complete and often neglected work, Day by Day. Essential reading for those interested in the writer who dominated post World War II poetry, the book will appeal to students of American literature and to more general readers as well. The divergent and controversial voices in these essays testify to radical disparities among Lowell's endless experiments and to the complexity and endurance of his work.

    It is written specifically for the reader who does not know Greek and who may be unfamiliar with the context of the Athenian drama festival but who nevertheless wants to appreciate the plays in all their complexity. Simon Goldhill aims to combine the best contemporary scholarly criticism in classics with a wide knowledge of modern literary studies in other fields. He discusses the masterpieces of Athenian drama in the light of contemporary critical controversies in such a way as to enable the student or scholar not only to understand and appreciate the texts of the most commonly read plays, but also to evaluate and utilize the range of approaches to the problems of ancient drama.

    It is not primarily concerned with specific pictures and the things people say about them, but rather with the way we talk about the idea of imagery, and all its related notions of picturing, imagining, perceiving, likening, and imitating. It is a book about images, therefore, that has no illustrations except for a few schematic diagrams, a book about vision written as if by a blind author for a blind reader. If it contains any insight into real, material pictures, it is the sort that might come to a blind listener, overhearing the conversation the sighted speakers talking about images. My hypothesis is that such a listener might see patterns in these conversations that would be invisible to the sighted participant.

    He is especially penetrating on Hermann Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka's novels vividly reveals the comic terror of Kafka's bureaucratized universe.Kundera's discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, and the creation of character in the post-psychological novel.

    Emphasizing individual works and artists over theory and method, and with an authoritativeness characteristic of all his writing, Roger Shattuck embraces a wide range of themes, including politics, theatricality, the dynamics of artistic movements and the nature of consciousness. The essays here range from his celebrated analyses of Dada and the 1935 International Writers' Congress, to fresh considerations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, to groundbreaking studies of Monet, Magritte and the art writings of Meyer Shapiro. A tour-de-force of aesthetic philosophy and criticism, "The Innocent Eye" is, says "The New York Times," "a fast-paced, interesting book spun out of a wealth of intimately assimilated culture."

    Through a set of tenaciously detailed readings, the book illuminates a number of persistent problems or conflicts in Shakespearean drama - in particular a contradiction between words and things, body and language, which is also explored in terms of law, sexuality and Nature. Language and desire, Terry Eagleton argues, are seen by Shakespeare as a kind of 'surplus' over and above the body, stable and social roles and a fixed human nature. But the attitude of the plays to such a 'surplus' is profoundly ambivalent; if they admire it as the very source of human creativity, they also fear its anarchic, trangressive force. Underlying such ambiguities, the book convincingly shows, is a deeper ideological struggle, between feudalist traditionalism on the one hand, and the emergence of new forms of bourgeois individualism on the other. This book revels how, in the light of our own contemporary theories of language, sexuality and society, we can understand the issues present in Shakespeare's drama which previously have remained obscure.

    The elder statesman of liberal politics reflects on the passing scene.

    He stresses the systematic nature of literary discourse and its tendency to create systems of interrelated texts wherein each author's mode of assimilating and changing the tradition becomes a part of the tradition. Imitation, Conte asserts, should not be regarded merely as the inert confluence of historical circumstances but rather as a rhetorical figure in itself-and indeed as one of the major rhetorical devices of classical Latin poetry.The first half of the book establishes Conte's theoretical position; that position is then applied in detail to Virgil in the second half. Conte shows how Virgil, by contrasting bucolic and elegiac genres in Eclogue 10, effects a confrontation between different models of life. He discusses the Aeneid at length, demonstrating how Virgil modifies and transforms both Greek and Roman epic conventions. Virgil's ability to simultaneously maintain a plurality of points of view, Conte believes, made it possible for him to transcend the limits set by his predecessors and thereby to enrich the communicative and expressive range of the epic genre.These suggestive essays address important issues in the field of classical literature and interpretive method. They will find an appreciative audience among classicists and their students, comparativists, literary theorists, and anyone else concerned with the application of contemporary critical and semiotic theory to literary texts.

    In the early decades of the twentieth century, Hugh Kenner, observes, technology tended to engulf people gradually, coercing behavior they were not aware of. The Modernist writers were sensitive to technological change, however, and throughout their works are reflections of this fact. Kenner shows, for example, how Eliot's lines One thinks of all the hands/Thatare raising dingy shades/In a thousand furnished rooms suggest the advent of the alarm clock and, beyond that, what the clocks enabled: the new world of the commuter, in which a principal event was waking up in the morning under the obligation to get yourself somewhere else, and arrive there ontime. In fascinating examinations of Pound, Joyce, and Beckett, in addition to Eliot, Kenner looks at how inventions as various as the linotype, the typewriter, the subway, and the computer altered the way the world was viewed and depicted. Whether discussing Joyce's acute awareness of the nuancesof typesetting or Beckett's experiments with a proto-computer-language, Kenner consistently illuminates in fresh new ways the works of these authors and offers, almost incidentally, a wealth of anecdotes and asides that will delight the general reader and the literary specialist alike