W. G. Sebald: Writing Pictures

Rick Poynor on W. G. Sebald's use of photography and archival imagery

A spread from W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz.

Rick Poynor of Design Observer discusses the role and importance of imagery in the work of the late experimental novelist, W. G. Sebald:

Sebald is brilliantly visual. He makes you realize with some discomfort that you often fail to look attentively enough at what you see. Another novelist referred to the “phenomenal configuration” of the author’s mind and what astonishes and delights in Sebald’s sentences, superbly rendered by his translators, is his ability to convey not just the detail of so many things hitting the senses in a rain of fleeting simultaneous impressions, but the precise emotional shading and personal import of each of these moments. His eye records with photographic accuracy and then these perceptions are recovered from memory and reconstituted as fictional experience with the same exhilaratingly scrupulous fidelity. The complication in Sebald’s writing, which he apparently intended, lies in our uncertainty about how much of what he describes derives from his own experiences (seemingly a lot) and how much of it is largely or entirely imagined. Based on a reading of the books alone, the narrators show every sign of being Sebald himself, but we know from what he has said elsewhere that these melancholy figures are fictionalized versions of the author.

Another striking aspect of the books is the use Sebald makes of photographs and other visual material, such as architectural plans, engravings, paintings and restaurant bills. He drops these uncaptioned images into the text, providing an additional level of documentary “evidence,” and you become convinced that Sebald really must have undertaken the walk or visited the building that his narrator describes. Literary reviewers usually note the presence of these images, acknowledging that they add to the books’ unique flavor, but their role in the composition of the texts and the exact ways in which text and images relate to each other have received little attention. [Read more]

Rick Poynor, 'W. G. Sebald: Writing in Pictures'

Design Observer, 21 December 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Coetzee on Sebald and the Uncanny
• Will Self on Sebald and the Holocaust

David Foster Wallace: Fate, Time and Language

American novelist and academic presents an essay on free will

David Foster Wallace, Fate, Time and Language

While David Foster Wallace is known to many for his experimental fiction (perhaps most notably, Infinite Jest), he also gained recognition as a writer on literature and philosophy. Since his tragic death in 2008, aged 46, his writing on figures such as David Lynch and Franz Kafka continues to draw interest from the wider academic community.

Columbia University Press have delved deeper into the archive for this new publication. Released earlier this month, the book draws upon work composed well in advance of Wallace's fiction and criticism. Entitled Fate, Time and Language: An Essay on Free Will, this early work examines the philosophy of Richard Taylor, and holds clues to the writer Wallace would later become. The Columbia University Press website has more:

In 1962, the philosopher Richard Taylor used six commonly accepted presuppositions to imply that human beings have no control over the future. David Foster Wallace not only took issue with Taylor's method, which, according to him, scrambled the relations of logic, language, and the physical world, but also noted a semantic trick at the heart of Taylor's argument.

Fate, Time, and Language presents Wallace's brilliant critique of Taylor's work. Written long before the publication of his fiction and essays, Wallace's thesis reveals his great skepticism of abstract thinking made to function as a negation of something more genuine and real. He was especially suspicious of certain paradigms of thought-the cerebral aestheticism of modernism, the clever gimmickry of postmodernism-that abandoned "the very old traditional human verities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community." As Wallace rises to meet the challenge to free will presented by Taylor, we witness the developing perspective of this major novelist, along with his struggle to establish solid logical ground for his convictions. This volume, edited by Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert, reproduces Taylor's original article and other works on fatalism cited by Wallace. James Ryerson's introduction connects Wallace's early philosophical work to the themes and explorations of his later fiction, and Jay Garfield supplies a critical biographical epilogue. [Read more]

Publisher's website: David Foster Wallace, Fate, Time and Language, (Columbia University Press, 2010)

Snowbound

What's to come later this week on A Piece of Monologue

Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980)

Well, it's been an incredibly busy couple of weeks for me. I'm about to embark on an academic research trip to Los Angeles, and the UK snow has kept me from posting regular updates.

With any luck, I'll be posting from L.A. before the end of the week. Among the treasures you can expect will be a bumper-edition of Disjecta, and some exciting announcements on recent/forthcoming events and publications. So stay tuned for further updates!

Limit(e) Beckett: Issue 1: Spectral Beckett

New journal launches with an impressive selection of academic studies

Limit(e) Beckett: Spectres de Beckett/ Spectral Beckett

Spectral Beckett

A new bilingual journal focussing on the work of Samuel Beckett is now freely available to read online. Limit(e) Beckett has launched its first issue with the proceedings of their conference Spectres de Beckett / Spectral Beckett, held in Paris in 2009.

The idea of the ghost, or the spectre, has both a cultural and philosophical relevance in the wider academic community, and it's useful to see Limit(e) Beckett invigorating contemporary Beckett studies with its hands-on approach to recent debate. While to many the spectre is an emblem of the gothic tradition, its uncanny heritage seems to lurk in the various nooks and crannies of Western literature and philosophy. Emblems and motifs of haunting and ghostly return can be found just about everywhere, from the Shakespearian stage to Sigmund Freud's couch to Marxist revolutionary theory - ghostly emanations and spectral figures are never far away. In Limit(e) Beckett, the spectral becomes a useful framework for exploring a wide range of themes, from questions of literature and authorship, to debates surrounding politics, history and tradition - and much else besides.

Having just begun a research project on Beckett, trauma and ghosts, this issue could not have come at a better time for me. But you don't need me to convince you of Limit(e) Beckett's impressive scope and ambition. The first issue is freely available to read online, and even downloadable in a PDF format.

Articles

Andrew Gibson, on Beckett and the Fourth Republic;
Carla Locatelli, on Beckett's elemental ghosts;
Chiara Montini, on the narrator in Mercier et Camier and Mercier and Camier;
Angela Moorjani, on Beckett and Jules Renard;
Mark Nixon, on Beckett's unpublished short story 'Echo's Bones';
Derval Tubridy, on Breath and the sublime; and
Dirk van Hulle, on Beckett, Shakespeare and nothing.

Website: http://limitebeckett.paris-sorbonne.fr/current.html

Second Issue: Call for Papers

As if that wasn't enough, Limit(e) Beckett is already scouting talent for their second issue, exploring the role that cliché plays in Beckett's work.

CFP: Cliché in the work of Samuel Beckett: Stimulus or Obstacle? [Read more]
Deadline for Submissions: 30 January 2011


Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Limit(e) Beckett: A New Online Academic Journal
• Buried Alive: Beckett and the Uncanny
• Writers: Samuel Beckett

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

David Lynch

Literature:

J. G. Ballard: William Boyd reads 'My dream of flying to Wake Island'
Books on the frontline defence of UK student protests
Christopher Isherwood: New York Times discovers Isherwood's encounter with Mick Jagger in the second volume of his Diaries
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Dostoyevsky's death mask
Will Self: Lengthy interview on the Sky Arts programme, In Confidence
J. D. Salinger: The New Yorker staff writer Lillian Ross reflects on a long-standing friendship with the American author
Leo Tolstoy: Anatoly Naiman of the Moscow News reflects on 'the Tolstoy we have lost'
Mathias Énard: Stephen Mitchelmore reviews Zone
Saul Bellow: Saul Bellow reads from Humboldt's Gift (1988)
New Yorker compiles a year's reading
Philip Larkin: Unknown poem discovered in shoe box
Maud Newton launches a pop culture TUMBLR blog

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

FWSA Book Prize 2011
Yale University on iTunes U: A selection of downloadable podcasts
Maurice Blanchot: Jacky Wang on Blanchot and inventing language in an unfamiliar tongue
Erik Morse: On the cultural motif of the haunted house

Film:

David Lynch: Director, artist and musician David Lynch answers questions on Twitter
Ridley Scott: According to sources, Alien prequel to proceed under the title 'Paradise'
Alfred Hitchcock: Roundtable discussion: 'Finding equilibrium in Hitchcock's Vertigo'
Thomas Bernhard: Three Days, a documentary film by Ferry Radax, now available on DVD
The Art of Film Title Design

Television

David Lynch: John Coulthart revisits landmark television series, Twin Peaks

Art & Design

Miles Davis: Richard Williams reviews a recent collection of paintings by the American jazz trumpeter

Theatre

William Shakespeare: Alan A. Stone on King Lear and Humanity

Music

David Lynch: The Guardian's Jason Solomon interviews filmmaker David Lynch about his recent foray into pop music
David Lynch: Dazed Digital interviews David Lynch
Stephen Morris: Joy Division and New Order drummer selects his favourite albums

Thank you to all link contributions, which can be found on the A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

Humanity and King Lear

Alan A. Stone on William Shakespeare's tragedy

Stacy Keach and Edward Gero in the 2006 Goodman Theatre production of King Lear.
Photograph: Liz Lauren

Alan A. Stone unravels the contemporary relevance of Shakespeare's King Lear, with reference to recent theatric and cinematic productions (via 3QuarksDaily):

For centuries after Shakespeare wrote King Lear, interpreters refused to accept the play’s desolation and lack of redemption. Nahum Tate gave it a happy ending in 1691, and for 200 years a redeemed Lear and the Earl of Gloucester would peacefully retire while their good children, Cordelia and Edgar, marry and rule a unified Britain. As late as the start of the twentieth century, preeminent Shakespeare scholar A. C. Bradley lectured that Lear had reached transcendence through his suffering and died happy. Even though the play contains the bleakest line in all of Shakespeare—Lear’s “Never, never, never, never, never,” as he holds his daughter’s dead body in his arms—Bradley insisted on a Christian moral to the story.

Today King Lear is recognized as the greatest tragedy in the English language, less brilliant than Hamlet but more profound and prophetic: “Humanity,” the Duke of Albany laments, “must perforce prey on itself, Like monsters of the deep.” There is no god or justice in the pre-Christian world that Shakespeare invented for Lear. Stanley Cavell’s justly famous essay “The Avoidance of Love” captures the paradox of Lear for modern audiences. “We can only learn through suffering” but have “nothing to learn from it,” he writes.

Stalin’s reign of terror, Hitler’s concentration camps, and the atomic bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave philosophers, literary critics, and theater directors a context for understanding Shakespeare’s grim text. Even so, actors and directors remained puzzled by Lear. Lear himself asks in Act I, “Does any here know me?” Was he already senile before he divided up his kingdom in exchange for public professions of love from his three daughters, or was he driven mad by the consequences of his rash decision as he realized that the two daughters who professed so much love and devotion—Goneril and Regan—now ruled over him? Regan and her husband, the Duke of Cornwall, lock Lear out of Gloucester’s home, and leave him in a terrible storm. “Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow! You cataracts and hurricanes, spout till you have drenched out steeples,” he cries. But there is also pathos, “Here I stand your slave, a poor, infirm, weak and despised old man.” Lear is at once emotionally transparent and unable to acknowledge what he has done—“Who is it that can tell me who I am?” he wonders. [Read more]

Alan A. Stone, 'All of humanity'

The Boston Review, November/December 2010

Reading Finnegans Wake

Michael Wood reviews a scholarly new edition of Joyce's final masterpiece

James Joyce

In this week's London Review of Books, Michael Wood takes on James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, the work in progress that, for many, feels like a read of regress:

Writers on or introducers of Finnegans Wake regularly imagine three sorts of reader or non-reader of the book. Philip Kitcher, in Joyce’s Kaleidoscope, lists ‘those too intimidated to try to read it, those who have tried and failed, and … those who write about it’. Roger Marsh, the producer of Jim Norton’s and Marcella Riordan’s haunting audio version, names ‘new readers’, ‘readers who have never been able to make much headway’ and ‘those who already have some familiarity with the book’. For good measure, there is also Seamus Deane’s group of untimid abstainers for whom the book’s taken-for-granted unreadability becomes ‘the pseudo-suave explanation for never having read it’. Of course these three (or four) groups may represent quite different people, but it is possible (I speak for myself) for one person to belong to all of the first three: to have tried without regarding what one has been doing as a real try; to have failed by dint of not trying hard enough; and to have written about the book anyway, because ‘some familiarity’ is not entirely nothing. I take comfort from the fact that Jacques Derrida manifestly (in ‘Deux mots pour Joyce’) put himself in this category, and for such a reader the scepticism about grand schemes or total understanding that we find in the best recent criticism is very attractive. John Bishop, for example, says ‘the only way not to enjoy Finnegans Wake is to expect that one has to plod through it word by word making sense of everything in linear order.’ This is a brave claim, but it is true that the book is hard not to enjoy – it’s just even harder to cope with one’s bewilderment. Kitcher says he ‘cannot see how to read the Wake as a vast allegory of human history’, and does not believe ‘that Joyce has any great interest in large theories of history or any ambitious theses to defend in this area’. So much for Vico and Jung, and all those epic readings, like that of Campbell and Robinson’s Skeleton Key, and even Anthony Burgess’s Here Comes Everybody. Finn Fordham, in Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake, wryly says, ‘It is one of the most enduring universal myths about Finnegans Wake that it is about enduring universal myths,’ and reassuringly remarks that ‘the first impression of a mix of recognisable sense and incomprehensible nonsense will always return, however deeply immersed you get in the book.’

There is an answer to a worry of Derrida’s here, and also to several groups of naysayers who appear like ghostly lawyers in Kitcher’s study, suggesting that Joyce is nothing but an annoying riddler, merely out to baffle his readers terminally. Needless to say, this is not Kitcher’s own view. Derrida reads and admires Joyce but is not sure he likes him, because Joyce writes us into the book we are reading, catches us up into a cultural memory far larger than our own. This is an act of war from the story or land of Babel, Derrida says, an ‘acte de guerre babelien’, and he is not sure we can like this without resentment or jealousy. He goes on to sketch various possibilities of escape from this dominion, but he doesn’t seem to put much faith in them. And yet, at the end of his essay/talk, he provides the answer in a series of brilliant questions. ‘Why does laughter inform the whole experience that relates us to Finnegans Wake … What does this writing teach us about the essence of laughter when it sometimes laughs at the notion of essence, at the limits of the calculable and the incalculable?’ The next sentence includes the phrase that seems to me to put the matter to rest (by refusing all rest, to be sure): ‘a writing of which we can no longer decide whether it is still calculating or not’, where ‘still calculating’, I take it, means still wanting to mean something, or knowing what one means.

Derrida returns to Babel and the war, but surely it’s easy to make peace with a writer who finally lets us (and himself) go in this way, and in their very different terms Kitcher and Fordham offer such a writer to us. ‘Our task,’ Kitcher says, ‘is to find a set of readings … that produce an illuminating pattern on the kaleidoscope – where the reader sets the standard for what counts as illuminating.’ For Fordham, Finnegans Wake is a book that ‘unravels … the universals that it seems to set up … because deviating detail overwhelms those unitary elements that attempt to secure strategies of totalisation’. ‘Deviating detail’ is perfect, and I would want only to linger over the laughter. Why are we laughing, and what can it mean or fail to mean that the book we hold in our hands has a joke in every sentence? [Read more]

Michael Wood, 'Quashed Quotatoes'

London Review of Books, Vol. 32 No. 24, 16 December 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• New Edition of Finnegans Wake
• 'Obliged by him': Jacques Derrida on James Joyce
• 'A House of Life': Anthony Burgess on James Joyce
• Blake Morrison and Ulysses and Us
• Joe Biden: James Joyce fan
• Re Joyce
• Re: Joyce | Frank Delaney reads Ulysses
• Blonde Bookworm: Marilyn Monroe's love of literature

Will Self Interview: In Confidence

British writer interviewed for Sky Arts television series

Will Self has discussed his recent semi-autobiographical work, Walking to Hollywood, and a number of other topics on the Sky Arts programme, In Confidence (via will-self.com):

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Will Self

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

Atelier Carvalho Bernau's typeface, celebrating the 80th birthday of Jean-Luc Godard

Literature:

Samuel Beckett: This week's Ends and Odds over at the Samuel Beckett Debts and Legacies website.

Gabriel Josipovici: Who reads Proust? Ramona Koval interviews Josipovici about modernism on The Book Show, ABC Radio National

Marcel Proust: 20th century novelist on the sensationalism of the daily news

Thomas Bernhard: Recent photographs of Bernhard's house and surrounding landscape, by Hennetmair

TLS Books of the Year 2010

Patti Smith: Video of artist and musician Patti Smith, author of Just Kids, in conversation with Jonathan Lethem, author of Chronic City, earlier this year

The Future of the Literary Journal: An interview with Electric Literature's Andy Hunter

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Will Self at the Freud Museum in London: A fundraising event, organized as part of the Intimate Evenings series

Roland Barthes: Audio recordings of Barthes' lectures at the Collège de France, 1977

Film:

Jean-Luc Godard: To celebrate the 80th birthday of the new wave French filmmaker, Atelier Carvalho Bernau has designed a typeface that is free for readers to download

Music

Joy Division Plus: Rough Trade celebrate the launch of Joy Division +- with Peter Saville, Stephen Morris and Jon Savage

Iggy Pop: A television interview where Iggy Pop discusses working with David Bowie, and the recording of his 1977 album The Idiot

Thank you to all link contributions, which can be found on the A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

Marcel Proust on reading newspapers

20th century novelist on the sensationalism of the daily news

Marcel Proust, quoted in Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Save Your Life:

That abominable and sensual act called reading the newspaper, thanks to which all the misfortunes and cataclysms in the universe over the last twenty-four hours, the battles which cost the lives of fifty thousand men, the murders, the strikes, the bankruptcies, the fires, the poisonings, the suicides, the divorces, the cruel emotions of statesmen and actors, are transformed for us, who don't even care, into a morning treat, blending in wonderfully, in a particularly exciting and tonic way, with the recommended ingestion of a few sips of café au lait.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Marcel Proust's Obituary

Will Self at the Freud Museum, London

A fundraising event

Will Self

Intimate Evenings
Will Self
7 December 2010
7pm-9pm

Intimate Evenings is a series of special fundraising events for the Freud Museum London. It brings leading thinkers and writers of our time to the unique setting of Sigmund Freud's last home.

The first in this extraordinary series sees celebrated author Will Self on the couch. For this intimate appearance, Self turns his pungent wit and satirical gaze on Freud and psychoanalysis. Psycho-geographer meets the inventor of psychoanalysis...

This is a rare opportunity to get up close and personal with one of the UK's foremost contemporary writers and help the Freud Museum in the process.

Lisa Appignanesi, writer and broadcaster, author of Mad, Bad and Sad, will introduce the evening. She is the President of English PEN and chair of the Freud Museum London.

The Freud Museum's central function is to celebrate the life, work and legacy of Sigmund and Anna Freud. Fundraising is essential to help this small independent museum protect its collections and maintain its ambitious programme of development, exhibitions and events. Please join us tonight, and support the Freud Museum in carrying out its work. [Freud Museum, London]

Booking

Tickets:
£25.00, to include drinks and canapes

Booking:
To book online please click here

Advance booking is highly recommended

For more information please contact the Museum at eventsandmedia@freud.org.uk or call 020 7435 2002