The Field of Cultural Production


Pierre Bourdieu - 1993
    He examines the individuals and institutions involved in making cultural products what they are: not only the writers and artists, but also the publishers, critics, dealers, galleries, and academies. He analyzes the structure of the cultural field itself as well as its position within the broader social structures of power.The essays in his volume examine such diverse topics as Flaubert's point of view, Manet's aesthetic revolution, the historical creation of the pure gaze, and the relationship between art and power.The Field of Cultural Production will be of interest to students and scholars from a wide range of disciplines: sociology and social theory, literature, art, and cultural studies.

For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction


Alain Robbe-Grillet - 1963
    For a New Novel reevaluates the techniques, ethos, and limits of contemporary fiction. This is a work of immense importance for any discussions of the history of the novel, and for contemporary thinking about the future of fiction.

Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930


Edmund Wilson - 1931
    S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. As Alfred Kazin later wrote, "Wilson was an original, an extraordinary literary artist . . . He could turn any literary subject back into the personal drama it had been for the writer."

Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton


Mark Polizzotti - 1995
    Polizzotti reconstructs Breton's intense and formative friendships with Man Ray, Duchamp, Dali, and Miro, among others; his legendary encounters with Trotsky, Freud, and Sartre; and his several marriages and love affairs.

Rabelais and His World


Mikhail Bakhtin - 1965
    In Bakhtin's view, the spirit of laughter and irreverence prevailing at carnival time is the dominant quality of Rabelais's art. The work of both Rabelais and Bakhtin springs from an age of revolution, and each reflects a particularly open sense of the literary text. For both, carnival, with its emphasis on the earthly and the grotesque, signified the symbolic destruction of authority and official culture and the assertion of popular renewal. Bakhtin evokes carnival as a special, creative life form, with its own space and time.Written in the Soviet Union in the 1930s at the height of the Stalin era but published there for the first time only in 1965, Bakhtin's book is both a major contribution to the poetics of the novel and a subtle condemnation of the degeneration of the Russian revolution into Stalinist orthodoxy. One of the essential texts of a theorist who is rapidly becoming a major reference in contemporary thought, Rabelais and His World is essential reading for anyone interested in problems of language and text and in cultural interpretation.

Doomed to Fail


J.J. Anselmi - 2020
    Anselmi covers the bands and musicians that have impacted those styles most―Black Sabbath, Candlemass, Melvins, Eyehategod, Godflesh, Neurosis, Saint Vitus, and many others―while diving into the cultural doom that has spawned such music, from the bombing of Birmingham and hurricane devastation of New Orleans to glaring economic inequality, industrial alienation, climate change, and widespread addiction. Along the way, Anselmi interweaves the musical experiences that have led him to proudly identify as one of the doomed.

The Supermale


Alfred Jarry - 1902
    Jarry's equally revolutionary novels form the cornerstones of a science he named "Pataphysics," a method for the rational disordering of rationality that has influenced countless subsequent artists and writers, from Marcel Duchamp to Wim Delvoye, Andr� Breton to J.G. Ballard. The Supermale elaborates a carnal Pataphysics: Andr� Marcueil, gentleman and scientist, believes that human energy has no limits, and demonstrates his belief by undertaking a 10,000-mile bicycle race with a locomotive, followed by an indefinite bout of lovemaking. After 82 acts of intercourse, doctors finally hook him up to a machine, with whom he merges in the book's--and the Supermale's--final climax. Like a mock Jules Verne, Jarry describes these deranged proceedings in a calm prose, crisply rendered here by Barbara Wright, one of French literature's finest translators.

The Penguin History of the Second World War


Peter Calvocoressi - 1972
    The first part deals with the war in the West, and the second covers the war in the Pacific Theatre. The three highly regarded authors of this classic resource create a fluid narrative that provides vivid portraits of the war leaders and an unflinching exploration of the devastation and hardship of this major world conflict.

The Rise of the Novel, Updated Edition


Ian P. Watt - 1957
    B. Carnochan accounts for the increasing interest in the English novel, including the contributions that Ian Watt's study made to literary studies: his introduction of sociology and philosophy to traditional criticism.

A Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi: The Ideal Guide to Sounding, Acting and Shrugging Like the French


Charles Timoney - 2009
    To survive in the most sophisticated - and the most scathing - nation on Earth you will need to understand the many peculiarities of the (very peculiar) French culture. And for that you need A Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi.If you want to fit in with the French you'll have to know how to deal with sardonic waiters; why French children hate Charlemagne; the etiquette of kissing, joke-telling and drinking songs, what to do with a bidet, the correct recipe for a salade nicoise and, of course, how to convey absolute, shattering indifference with a single syllable (Bof!).Charles Timoney, the author of Pardon My French, provides a practical, pleasurable guide to the charms of the Gallic people - from their daily routines to their peerless gesticulations, from their come-ons to their put-downs. Read on and put the oh la la back into your French vacances. Your inner gaul will thank you for it.

On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism


Jonathan D. Culler - 1982
    Jonathan Culler's On Deconstruction is a typically patient, thoughtful, illuminating exposition of the ideas of Jacques Derrida and their application to literary studies."--David Lodge, Commonweal "Culler is lucid and thorough, can move into and out of other people's arguments without losing the sense of his own voice and argument, and can manage to seem equally at home with Freudianism, feminism, and traditional literary criticism."--Times Literary Supplement "As a practicing critic Culler has always been a deconstructor, and he approaches this topic with special immediacy and force. In On Deconstruction he offers generous summaries of numerous representative articles and a fine annotated bibliography. . . . His magisterial way of tracing particular topics and techniques through our diaspora of critical texts, and his provocative analyses, cannot fail to focus any critic's thinking about deconstruction."--Modern Language Quarterly "Gifted with grace and clarity, Culler provides us with a stimulating survey of contemporary literary criticism."--Antioch Review With an emphasis on readers and reading, Jonathan Culler considered deconstruction in terms of the questions raised by psychoanalytic, feminist, and reader-response criticism. On Deconstruction is both an authoritative synthesis of Derrida's thought and an analysis of the often-problematic relation between his philosophical writings and the work of literary critics. Culler's book is an indispensable guide for anyone interested in understanding modern critical thought. This edition marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first publication of this landmark work and includes a new preface by the author that surveys deconstruction's history since the 1980s and assesses its place within cultural theory today.

Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree


Gérard Genette - 1982
    Genette describes the multiple ways a later text asks readers to read or remember an earlier one. In this regard, he treats the history and nature of parody, antinovels, pastiches, caricatures, commentary, allusion, imitations, and other textual relations. Gérard Genette is one of the most original and influential literary critics of modern France. He is the major practitioner of narratological criticism, a pioneer in structuralism, and a much-admired literary historian. Such works as Narrative Discourse and Mimologics (Nebraska 1995) have established his international reputation as a literary theorist of the first order.

Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics


Hubert L. Dreyfus - 1982
    To demonstrate the sense in which Foucault's work is beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, the authors unfold a careful, analytical exposition of his oeuvre. They argue that during the of Foucault's work became a sustained and largely successful effort to develop a new method—"interpretative analytics"—capable fo explaining both the logic of structuralism's claim to be an objective science and the apparent validity of the hermeneutical counterclaim that the human sciences can proceed only by understanding the deepest meaning of the subject and his tradition. "There are many new secondary sources [on Foucault]. None surpass the book by Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. . . . The American paperback edition contains Foucault's 'On the Genealogy of Ethics,' a lucid interview that is now our best source for seeing how he construed the whole project of the history of sexuality."—David Hoy, London Review of Books

India Song


Marguerite Duras - 1973
    In the India of 1937, with the smell of laurels and leprosy permeating the air, the characters perform a dance of doomed love to the strains of a dying colonialism.

Letters on England


Voltaire - 1733
    He was full of enthusiasm and freedom - as opposed to the tyrannical feudal society of his homeland. Letters on England discusses English religious sects, politics, scientists and writers with great admiration, yet the clever Voltaire also flattered his French readers with humorous references to the old-fashioned clothes and speech of the Quakers and to antics in the House of Commons. At first banned in France, this intriguing and often comic account of a culture viewed through foreign eyes was to prove highly influential in shaping French attitudes to England.Leonard Tancock's translation brilliantly captures Voltaire's ironic tone, and is accompanied by an introduction discussing his depiction of England and the events that led to his exile. This edition also includes notes, new further reading and chronology, and an appendix on Voltaire's verse translation of English works.