Publications

Sebald’s Vision
Carol Jacobs
Publication Year: 2015
Description:

In Sebald’s Vision, Carol Jacobs examines the author’s prose, novels, and poems, illuminating the ethical and aesthetic questions that shaped his remarkable oeuvre. Through the trope of “vision,” she explores aspects of Sebald’s writing and the way the author’s indirect depiction of events highlights the ethical imperative of representing history while at the same time calling into question the possibility of such representation.

Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”
Roberto González Echevarría
Publication Year: 2015
Description:

The novel Don Quixote, written in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, is widely considered to be one of the greatest fictional works in the entire canon of Western literature. At once farcical and deeply philosophical, Cervantes’ novel and its characters have become integrated into the cultures of the Western Hemisphere, influencing language and modern thought while inspiring art and artists such as Richard Strauss and Pablo Picasso.

The Invention of Influence
Peter Cole
Publication Year: 2014
Description:

Peter Cole has been called “an inspired writer” (The Nation) and “one of the handful of authentic poets of his own American generation” (Harold Bloom). In this, his fourth book of poems, he presents a ramifying vision of human linkage. At the heart of the collection stands the stunning title poem, which brings us into the world of Victor Tausk, a maverick and tragic early disciple of Freud who wrote about one of his patients’ mental inventions — an “influence machine” that controlled his thoughts. In Cole’s symphonic poem, this machine becomes a haunting image for the ways in which tradition and the language of others shape so much of what we think and say.

Science and Technology in Modern China, 1880s–1940s
Jing Tsu
Publication Year: 2014
Description:

The first of its kind, this collection of critical essays opens up new venues in the comparative study of science and culture by focusing on the formative decades of modern China in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. It provides a wide-ranging examination of the cultural and intellectual history of science and technology in modern China.From anti-imperialism to the technology of Chinese writing, the commodification of novelties to the rise of the modern professional scientist, new lexica and appropriations of the past, the contributors map out a transregional and global circuitry of modern knowledge and practical know-how, nationalism and the amalgamation of new social practices.

Nativism, Zionism, and Beyond
Hannan Hever
Publication Year: 2014
Description:

The issue of nativism forms the base of any national culture, including Hebrew culture and literature. This book discusses the political and literary aspects of this phenomenon as it examines the work of three Hebrew poets: Esther Raab, Haim Gouri and Moshe Dor. Even though they differ in their poetics, they are similar by way of the debate they have with the territory of the land of Israel. Their common identity is what Israeli culture calls “Sabra” – the cactus fruit, prickly on the outside and soft and sweet on the inside – which is a metaphor of the Jewish settlers in the land of Israel, being tough and connected to the land.

Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy: Ethical and Political Themes in the Essais
David Quint
Publication Year: 2014
Description:

In a fresh reading of Montaigne’s Essais, David Quint portrays the great Renaissance writer as both a literary man and a deeply engaged political thinker concerned with the ethical basis of society and civil discourse. From the first essay, Montaigne places the reader in a world of violent political conflict reminiscent of the French Wars of Religion through which he lived and wrote. Quint shows how a group of interrelated essays, including the famous one on the cannibals of Brazil, explores the confrontation between warring adversaries: a clement or vindictive victor and his suppliant or defiant captive. How can the two be reconciled?

Inside Paradise Lost: Reading the Designs of Milton’s Epic
David Quint
Publication Year: 2014
Description:

The book uncovers patterns of allusion and verbal design that structure the meaning of Paradise Lost.  Arguing that the loss of Eden at the Fall of Adam and Eve is also the gain of Christian freedom, it describes the message of Milton’s great epic to be “make love, not war” or, as the poet puts it: “to create / Is greater than created to destroy.”

Awards:

The James Holly Hanford Award, The Milton Society of America

André Bazin’s New Media
Dudley Andrew
Publication Year: 2014
Description:

57 essays by André Bazin on Television, 3D, Cinerama and CinemaScope, collected, translated, annotated, and introduced.

With the power of God : theology and politics in modern Hebrew literature
Hannan Hever
Publication Year: 2013
Description:

המאוחד, תשע”ג 2013.
    232 עמ’.
    With the power of God : theology and politics in modern Hebrew literature / Hannan Hever

Sonallah Ibrahim's That Smell and Notes from Prison
Robyn Creswell
Publication Year: 2013
Description:

One of the most influential Arabic novels of recent times, That Smell is Sonallah Ibrahim’s modernist masterpiece. Composed in the wake of a five-year prison sentence, the semi-autobiographical story follows a recently released political prisoner as he wanders through Cairo, adrift in his native city. Published in 1966, the novel was immediately banned. For this edition, the translator Robyn Creswell has also included an annotated selection of Notes from Prison culled from Ibrahim’s prison diary — a personal archive comprising hundreds of handwritten notes scribbled on Bafra-brand cigarette papers. These writings shed unexpected light on Ibrahim’s groundbreaking novel.

A Companion to Francois Truffaut
Dudley Andrew
Publication Year: 2013
Description:

31 new essays on Francois Truffaut divided into sections on his biography, his critical status, and his films.

co-edited with Anne Gillain.

The Poetry of Kabbalah; Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition
Peter Cole
Publication Year: 2012
Description:

This groundbreaking collection presents for the first time in English a substantial body of poetry that emerges directly from the sublime and often startling world of Jewish mysticism. Taking up Gershom Scholem’s call to plumb the “tremendous poetic potential” concealed in the Kabbalistic tradition, Peter Cole provides dazzling renderings of work composed on three continents over a period of some fifteen hundred years.