Publications

Modern Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction
Roberto González Echevarría
Publication Year: 2012
Description:

In the 1960s, Latin American literature became known worldwide as never before. Writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, and Mario Vargas Llosa all became part of the general culture of educated readers of English, French, German, and Italian. But few know about the literary tradition from which these writers emerged. Modern Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction remedies this situation, providing an overview of Latin American literature from the late eighteenth century to the present.

Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov
Martin Hägglund
Publication Year: 2012
Description:

Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov transformed the art of the novel in order to convey the experience of time. Nevertheless, their works have been read as expressions of a desire to transcend time—whether through an epiphany of memory, an immanent moment of being, or a transcendent afterlife. Martin Hägglund takes on these themes but gives them another reading entirely. The fear of time and death does not stem from a desire to transcend time, he argues. On the contrary, it is generated by the investment in temporal life. From this vantage point, Hägglund offers in-depth analyses of Proust’s Recherche, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Nabokov’s Ada.

Cuban Fiestas
Roberto González Echevarría
Publication Year: 2012
Description:

Roberto González Echevarría masterfully exposes the distinctive elements of the fiesta cubana that give depth and coherence to more than two centuries of Cuban cultural life. Reaching back to nineteenth-century traditions of Cuban art and literature, and augmenting them, in the twentieth, with the arts of narrative, the esthetic performances of sport and entertainment in nightclubs, on the baseball diamond, and in movie theaters, Cuban Fiestas renders the lilting strains of the fiesta and drum beats of the passage of time as keys to understanding the dynamic quality of Cuban culture.

Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora
Jing Tsu
Publication Year: 2011
Description:

In Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora, Jing Tsu explores the new global language trade, arguing that it aims at more sophisticated ways of exerting influence besides simply wielding knuckles of power. Through an analysis of the different relationships between language standardization, technologies of writing, and modern Chinese literature around the world from the nineteenth century to the present, this study transforms how we understand the power of language in migration and how that is changing the terms of cultural dominance.

Opening Bazin
Dudley Andrew
Publication Year: 2011
Description:

An Anthology of new essays taking up Bazin’s biography, aesthetic, social position in culture, and influence around the world.

Translated into French as Ouvrir Bazin (2014).

Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941
Katerina Clark
Publication Year: 2011
Description:

Moscow, the Fourth Rome breaches the intellectual iron curtain that has circumscribed cultural histories of Stalinist Russia, by broadening the framework to include considerable interaction with Western intellectuals and trends. Its integration of the understudied international dimension into the interpretation of Soviet culture remedies misunderstandings of the world-historical significance of Moscow under Stalin.

What Cinema Is! Bazin’s Question and its Charge
Dudley Andrew
Publication Year: 2010
Description:

A manifesto in favor of cinema as a privileged art of discovery, opposed to spectacle, with a history of this aesthetic idea from 1930 through Bazin to the New Wave and up to our own day.

Translated into French as Un Idée du Cinéma (2014).

Order and Chivalry Knighthood and Citizenship in Late Medieval Castile
Jesús Velasco
Publication Year: 2010
Description:

Knighthood and chivalry are commonly associated with courtly aristocracy and military prowess. Instead of focusing on the relationship between chivalry and nobility, Jesús D. Rodríguez-Velasco asks different questions. Does chivalry have anything to do with the emergence of an urban bourgeoisie? If so, how? And in a more general sense, what is the importance of chivalry in inventing and modifying a social class?

Don’t Tell it in Gath: The Palestinian Naqba in Hebrew Poetry, 1948-1958
Hannan Hever
Publication Year: 2010
Description:

An anthology of Hebrew poetry in which traces of the Palestinian Naqba appear, either directly or by implication. The anthology documents poetry from  collections and newspapers that appeared on and after November 30, 1947, the day after the vote at the United Nation that supported the “Partition Plan,” the two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. It is also the day on which the civil war between the Jews and the Palestinians holding the territory to be separated erupted. It thus covers Hebrew poetry written and published during the first decade of the sovereign state of Israel.

Binding Violence: Literary Visions of Political Origins
Moira Fradinger
Publication Year: 2010
Description:

Binding Violence exposes the relation between literary imagination, autonomous politics, and violence through the close analysis of literary texts—in particular Sophocles’ Antigone, D. A. F. de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, and Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat—that speak to a blind spot in democratic theory, namely, how we decide democratically on the borders of our political communities. These works bear the imprint of the anxieties of democracy concerning its other—violence—especially when the question of a redefinition of membership is at stake.

Abdelfattah Kilito's The Clash of Images
Robyn Creswell
Publication Year: 2010
Description:

Abdelfattah Kilito’s The Clash of Images is a sweet, Borgesian mix of bildungsroman memoir, family history, short-story collection, fable, and literary criticism. Written in a graceful and charming style, Kilito’s story takes place in an unnamed coastal city of memories where a child experiences first-hand the cultural clash of text and image in a changing, modern society.

translated by Robyn Creswell.

The Cambridge Companion to Fiction of the Romantic Period
Katie Trumpener
Publication Year: 2008
Description:

The novel of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has attracted many more readers and students in recent years. Its canon has been widened to include less well-known authors alongside Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth, and Thomas Love Peacock. This Companion offers an overview of British fiction written between roughly the mid-1760s and the early 1830s and is an ideal guide to the major authors, historical and cultural contexts, and later critical reception. The contributors to this volume represent the most up-to-date directions in scholarship, charting the ways in which the period’s social, political, and intellectual redefinitions created new fictional subjects, forms, and audiences.