Blanchot on Karl Marx and Communism

An extract from 'Marx's Three Voices'

Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophical manuscripts of 1844

From Maurice Blanchot's essay, 'Les Trois Paroles de Marx' in L'Amitié (translated from the French by Leslie Hill):

The example of Marx helps us to understand that the language of writing, which is a language of ceaseless contestation, must constantly be developed and interrupted in multiple ways. The language of communism is always at one and the same time tacit and violent, political and wise, direct, indirect, total and fragmentary, lengthy and nearly instantaneous. Marx does not live comfortably with this plurality of languages constantly colliding and being forced apart within him. Even if these languages seem to converge towards the end, they remain untranslatable into one another, and their heterogeneity, and the distance and interval that decentre them, make them non-contemporaneous with each other, such that, giving rise to an effect of irreducible distortion, they oblige those who have to withstand the challenge of reading (or executing) them to submit to a process of ceaseless readjustment.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Karl Marx and World Literature
• Mary gabriel, Love and Capital
• Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
• Maurice Blanchot on Kafka

Jacques Derrida on the word 'Auschwitz'

French philosopher on the problems of using 'proper names'

Photograph: Wiener library

Excerpt from an interview with Jacques Derrida, conducted by Dr. Michal Ben-Naftali on 8 January 1998 (translated from the French by Dr. Moshe Ron):

Interviewer: Until now I have been asking questions as if Deconstruction, your philosophy of history and historicity, is indeed a response to Auschwitz. Is that so? Is it only Auschwitz? Is it a philosophy of a survivor? In what sense (“I could have been there” – the dream you recall in your autobiography)? Why have you avoided from using this proper name (you did use others, such as “shibboleth” and “circumcision”?)

Jacques Derrida: First of all, deconstruction is not a philosophy of history. I don't know if you're taking this expression literally, but it is not a philosophy, and then the concept of history is too problematic for me to say that deconstruction is a philosophy of history. It is not a philosophy of history. Your question was why I do not use the name Auschwitz? Were there other questions before? I could try to demonstrate, but once more I can't do it here, not under these conditions, that the concept of survival occupies an altogether particular place in my work. There is a text entitled Survivre, and in it I try to note that surviving is neither life nor death, and I demonstrate how a certain concept of survival resists, does not allow itself to be reduced to the opposition of life and death. And that the trace is always a survival, everything begins with survival, and thus, by the situation of inheritance and the relation to spectrality, the logic of the spectral which runs through all my work for at least twenty five years (in La Carte postale, Spectres de Marx (11) ), the logic of the spectral implies another relation to the spirit of which we spoke little earlier, in the sense of the specter as Geist and ghost. It is the question of a logic of the phantom, of inheritance and thus of survival - we are in the domain of survival. The element in which all this discourse is inscribed is the element of survival.

Obviously, one needn't necessarily have in mind the survivors of Auschwitz in order to think of survival. In principle, logically, this discourse I hold about survival does not require a reference to the Shoah. But one would have to be blind and deaf not to see and hear, that each time survivors are mentioned today, this is what one thinks of. And naturally, I don't think of it any less than anyone else. But at the same time I insist on referring by this word or by this logic of survival to Auschwitz, but not only to Auscwitz, that is true. I want to note that this discourse could have been held in the 19th century, or even if Auschwitz never happened.

This, then, leads me to your question, why I did not name Auscwitz in this text (but I did name it elsewhere). It is because, as I've said in the beginning, I wouldn't like and I don't feel I have the right to give a single proper name to all genocide, to all possible extermination, even to the extermination of Jews under Nazism. Auschwitz, where I went a few weeks ago, Auschwitz is a place, it is terrible, Auschwitz, it is something monstrous, of course. But it was only, even during the experience of the extermination, a place among others. But why this metonymy? It is well known that when one says Auschwitz today, one doesn't think only of the town which still exists: there are still restaurants in Auschwitz, it is a very particular place.

I don't feel I have the right, both for reasons of rhetorical rigor and by respect for the victims, to use the name Auschwitz to designate any place where similar things have happened. It is a word often abused. People often use this word as a banner, a label: "At least I uttered the word Auschwitz, I've done my duty, my conscience is clear." I resist this easiness. For me, it is both too difficult and too easy. I don't use this word except in a serious manner, when I think it is necessary.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Why read Derrida?
• Philosophers: Jacques Derrida
• What is Hauntology?

Will Self: Walking out of London

Self embarks on a series of 'radial walks' around London

Will Self. Photograph: Casey Kelbaugh.

Will Self writes: 'In the first few years of the last decade I undertook a series of what I called – with a nod to Iain Sinclair’s circumambulation of London – ‘radial walks’. These were tramps of between three and five days from my home near the city’s centre out into its hinterland, following either a cardinal or an ordinal point of the compass, depending on which direction most appealed to me at the time. The first of these walks took me northeast up the Lea Valley, through Epping Forest, then followed a long path called the Essex Way that traversed the surprisingly deep country well to the north of the Thames corridor, before I debouched through Dedham Vale and the Stour Estuary to arrive at Harwich.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Will Self
• Will Self on Literature and Visual Arts
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers
• Will Self Interviews David Lynch
• Will Self, Walking to Hollywood

James Joyce Non-fiction Conference

International conference at the University of York · 23-25 March 2012

Sculpture of James Joyce, by Mikhail Iakovlev

“Outside his jurisfiction”: Interrogating Joyce’s non-fiction writings

International conference at the University of York
23-25 March 2012

About the Conference

Kevin Barry’s James Joyce: Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing contains over fifty pieces ranging in topic from the literary theorizing of ‘James Clarence Mangan’ and ‘Realism and Idealism in English Literature’ to the differing political interventions of ‘The Shade of Parnell’ and ‘Politics and Cattle Disease’ and in genre from short book review to spoken lecture. These disparate writings, drawn mainly from the first half of Joyce’s career, have always had a troubled place within the dominant strains of Joyce criticism. Although they are frequently referred to in commentaries on Joyce, the question has always been precisely what to make of them. Are they genuine expressions of Joyce’s intellectual and emotional attitudes or part of a developing and deliberately fashioned public persona? Is there any value, regardless of the intent of the pieces, in attempting to read Joyce’s fictional writings through these non-fictional writings? If so, is it legitimate to describe Ulysses and Finnegans Wake with reference to writing that precedes them by several decades?

Such questions haunt every discussion of Joyce’s non-fiction writing. The tremendous usefulness of these works as a source of pertinent and pithy quotation, and at times as a quasi-genetic source for later works, only aggravates the problem. “Outside his jurisfiction” seeks to bring these issues into focus, to interrogate the problematic boundary between Joyce’s ‘thoughts’ political and aesthetic and his writings, to ask what is at stake in the prefix ‘non-‘ to ask, indeed, to what the designation ‘non-fiction’ can reasonably be made to refer. Perhaps most importantly, this conference aims to consider the status of Joyce’s -- and by extension any artist’s -- non-fictional writings in relation to a much wider creative oeuvre; how can we appropriately connect, or, if necessary, separate, an artist’s life and opinions and his works?

We welcome abstracts of no more than 500 words for papers addressing any aspect of Joyce’s non-fictional writings, whether in conjunction with his fictional works, or in their own right. We especially welcome papers that problematize or stretch the definitive boundaries of the term ‘non-fiction’.

Conference Registration is now open.

Questions to consider include:

Can we think of Ellmann’s invention of the character ‘James Joyce’ as a piece of non-fiction (or perhaps ‘not-quite-fiction’) that has, more than any other, influenced our readings of Joyce’s fictional writings? How do we approach Joyce’s letters as pieces of writing? What is (and what should be) the status of Joyce’s prose ‘epiphanies’, which were never published in his life-time and which read like a sort of creative diary.

Our aim is to address these and many other questions, in a conference that re-envisions Joyce’s non-fictional writing and reinvigorates its use in future criticism.

Conference Organizers

• James Fraser
• Katherine Ebury
• Derek Attridge

Contact

• jamesjoyce.nonfiction@gmail.com

Website

• JamesJoyceNonFiction.com

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• James Joyce Centre: Winter 2011 Lecture Series
• James Joyce's Family Passport
• Gordon Bowker's Biography of James Joyce

Ruby Cohn 1922-2011

Renowned Beckett scholar passes away, aged 89

Ruby Cohn. Photograph: Linda Ben-Zvi.

George Hunka writes: 'Ruby Cohn, whose Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut (1962) established her as the foremost first-generation Beckett critic and introduced Beckett’s work to a huge general audience, passed away on Tuesday 18 October at the age of 89. Ms. Cohn spent most of her professional career as one of Beckett’s greatest advocates after seeing the first night of En Attendant Godot in Paris in 1953. She followed this first volume of criticism with several others, including Just Play: Beckett’s Theatre (1980), which remains indispensable, as does her most recent book, A Beckett Canon (2001), wherein she undertakes an inimitably personal and knowledgable survey of all of Beckett’s work, from first to last.' [Read More] Bruce Weber has provided an obituary for the New York Times [Read More] Women in Academia Report has also posted an obiturary [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

Simon Critchley: Style in Theory

Malta, November 2009

James Corby (University of Malta) interviews Simon Critchley (New School) by video link during the Style in Theory / Styling Theory conference in Malta in November 2009 (link via Continental Philosophy). Topics under discussion included the writing of Samuel Beckett, Maurice Blanchot, Wallace Stevens, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Tom McCarthy, Michel de Montaigne, and American president Barack Obama. Attendees included Jean-Michel Rabaté, Laurent Milesi and Catherine Belsey. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• How to Stop Living and Start Worrying

David Cronenberg Interview: Violence, Gadaffi and A Dangerous Method

Jeremy Paxman interviews David Cronenberg on BBC Newsnight

Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg discusses depictions of violence, Gadaffi's death, Freud and his new film A Dangerous Method on BBC Newsnight (contains footage some may find disturbing).

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method: Official Trailer (HD)

Harold Pinter's 'Umbrellas' Discovered

After 50 years, rare dramatic fragment found in the British Library

Harold Pinter

The Guardian website has published a rare fragment by Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter. Discovered at the British Library, 'Umbrellas' was performed only once as part of a revue in 1960. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Harold Pinter on meeting Samuel Beckett
• Harold Pinter in Krapp's Last Tape

John Banville on the Franz Kafka Prize

Irish writer travels to Prague to accept the Kafka Society's award

John Banville holding the Franz Kafka Prize. Photograph © ČTK

John Banville reflects on winning the prestigious Franz Kafka Prize in Prague (link via Michael Orthofer): '“It would have astonished Kafka that a fellow writer would have been standing in City Hall to collect an award in his name,” Banville said. “And he would have been even more astonished that I walked over here to collect it from my hotel, which used to be the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute [where Kafka once worked] …”' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Banville: Franz Kafka's other trial
• Franz Kafka, The Trial (Folio Society)
• John Banville on Beckett Biographies

Listen to Yeats Read Poetry

Poems read by Yeats, dating from 1931 to 1937

William Butler Yeats. Photograph: Edward Steichen.

Hear rare MP3 recordings of Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats, courtesy of PennSound (link via Ubu Web) [Listen]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• PJ Harvey on Pinter, Joyce and Yeats
• R. F. Foster, Words Alone: Yeats and His Inheritances
• W. B. Yeats and Modernism
• Freud and Yeats on Wikipedia

Granta Autumn 2011: Horror

Stephen King, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster and Will Self contribute

Granta, Autumn 2011. Cover design: The Chapman Brothers.

The Autumn 2011 issue of Granta includes pieces from a number of distinguished writers: 'Horror is everywhere - in cinema, in fiction, in real life. In this issue Paul Auster writes about the death of his mother, Will Self on his own rare blood-disease, and Mark Doty on desire, addiction and literature. We have fiction from Stephen King, Sarah Hall and Joy Williams, reportage from Peru and Sudan, and a themed costume fightclub in Los Angeles. As Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, ‘where there is no imagination there is no horror’. The issue also features cover art by The Chapman Brothers.' That's not to forget Don DeLillo's contribution. [Read More]

Barry Feinstein 1931-2011

Iconic photographer passes away, aged 80

Bob Dylan. Photograph: Barry Feinstein.

Bob Dylan. Photograph: Barry Feinstein.

Barry Feinstein, iconic photographer known for his images of Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Miles Davis, Elvis Presley and many others has passed away, aged 80 [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Bob Dylan to release Chronicles II and III
• Joyce Carol Oates on Bob Dylan
• Will Self on Bob Dylan
• The Photography of Tom Palumbo

Sylvia Plath Drawings Exhibition

The Mayor Gallery · 1 November - 17 December 2011

Sylvia Plath sketch of Boats in Rock Harbour, Cape Cod. Photograph: Frieda Hughes/The Mayor Gallery

The Mayor Gallery in London is exhibiting a series of drawings by the late American poet Sylvia Plath. The drawings have been in the possession of Plath's daughter, Frieda Hughes, and present a diverse range of subjects [See More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Sylvia Plath on US Postal Stamp
• Sylvia Plath meets Elizabeth Bowen

Simon Critchley on Shakespeare and Theory

Tilburg Philosophy Summer School · July 2012

Richard Burton in a production of William Shakespeare's Hamlet

Simon Critchley is to give a series of lectures that read Shakespeare in light of philosophy and contemporary critical theory: 'Simon Critchley will give a series of lectures on Hamlet which will deal with various ‘outsider’ interpretations of the play, notably those of Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Schmitt, Benjamin and Lacan as well as providing a close textual engagement with the play itself.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• Simon Critchley's How to Read Series
• Simon Critchley/Tom McCarthy Panels
• Simon Critchley on Critical Theory
• How to Stop Living and Start Worrying

William S. Burroughs on Allen Ginsberg

A rare clip from 1983

Filmed in Boulder, Colorado in 1983, William S. Burroughs reflects on his friendship with American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg (link via Biblioklept).

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: William S. Burroughs
• William S. Burroughs in Paris
• With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker
• Bringing Ginsberg's Howl to the Screen
• Kerouac and Ginsberg Correspondence
• Carolyn Cassady on the Beat Generation

Are we still Postmodern?

A review of the V&A exhibition, Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990

Marcus A. Jansen, 'Surreal' (2009)

In an article for Design Observer, Rick Poynor reviews the V&A's postmodernism exhibition in London, and asks 'Did we ever stop being postmodern?' (link via Susan Tomaselli): '[...] in a digital world, postmodernity has become everyone’s inescapable reality — “like it or not.” The V&A’s show and book are vital investigations of how we arrived here and the part played by design in the journey.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990

Lydia Davis on Translating Madame Bovary

From an article in The Paris Review

Photograph by Mathi09

Biblioklept has posted a quote from Lydia Davis' recent essay in The Paris Review, 'Some Notes on Translation and on Madame Bovary': 'The quality and nature of a translation (let’s say from the French) depends on at least three things: the translator’s knowledge of French language, history, and culture; his or her conception of the task of the translation; and his or her ability to write well in English. These three variables have subsets that can recombine infinitely, which is why one work can have such widely differing translations.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Maurice Blanchot at Station Hill
• Lydia Davis on very short stories
• Lydia Davis reviews Rimbaud's Illuminations
• George Craig, Writing Beckett's Letters

Alain Robbe-Grillet, Why I Love Barthes

Polity publishes a new collection of essays on the French thinker

Roland Barthes

In this week's TLS, Neil Badmington reviews a selection of Alain Robbe-Grillet's writings on Roland Barthes. Entitled Why I Love Barthes, the book is edited by Olivier Corpet and translated by Andrew Brown:

This slim volume brings together four texts: a transcription of Alain Robbe-Grillet's talk and the ensuing discussion at the Cerisy conference devoted to Roland Barthes in 1977, and three shorter pieces from 1980, 1981 and 1995. There are internal echoes - anecdotes and phrases recur - and parts of the second chapter appeared in Robbe-Grillet's autobiographical Le Miroir qui revient in 1984.

Having announced his 'shady, suspicious' friendship with Barthes, Robbe-Grillet makes a point that resonates throughout the book: the appeal of Barthes's work lies in its slipperiness, in the way that it 'never stops abandoning positions that it pretends to have won'. Barthes was an eel, he continues, whose writings destroy 'all temptation of dogmatism', closure and certainty. This is no cause for concern: 'Truth', Robbe-Grillet declares, 'in the last analysis, has never served anything but oppression', and Barthes's refusal to be 'an intellectual guru who'd come along to deliver a truth, a message' recast him, for Robbe-Grillet, as a fellow novelist. (The penultimate chapter, from 1995, imagines Barthes alive and busy rewriting Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther.)

Neil Badmington, 'Alain Robbe-Grillet, Why I Love Barthes'

Times Literary Supplement, 21 October 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Roland Barthes translated into Txt-spk
• Roland Barthes and the Preparation of the Novel
• Badmington on Roland Barthes and Mythologies
• Roland Barthes on Cafés
• Reading on Roland Barthes on Reading
• Robbe-Grillet: 'Towards a New Novel'

Will Self on Facebook and Youtube

New ways to browse Self's prolific output

Will Self. Painting by Jasper Joffe.

From Will-Self.com: 'Will Self now has an official FaceBook Page which shows the latest items posted on Will-Self.com and a YouTube Channel which gathers together various clips of Will from over the years.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Will Self

Jonathan Tallant, Metaphysics: An Introduction

An new introduction to metaphysics for undergraduate students.

Jonathan Tallant, Metaphysics: An Introduction

The following is a Press Release from the Continuum Books website:

Jonathan Tallant, Metaphysics: An Introduction

This is the definitive companion to the study of metaphysics. It provides students with an accessible, comprehensive and philosophically rigorous introduction to all the key concepts, issues and debates. Ideal for use on undergraduate courses, the structure and content of this textbook closely reflect the way metaphysics is studied.

Thematically structured, the text introduces all the various philosophical problems addressed by metaphysics through the idea of truth-making, a useful lens through which the topic is clearly and concisely explicated. With a particular focus on method in contemporary metaphysics, the book examines a variety of metaphysical topics, including the nature of properties, time, causation and objects.

The book offers lucid and incisive coverage of the field of metaphysics, its key concepts and current debates. Jonathan Tallant's cogent and thorough analysis is supplemented by student-friendly features, including chapter summaries, study questions and a comprehensive guide to further reading. Each chapter includes a series of specially designed mind-maps to help students visualise the logical space being explored and how the arguments push in different directions.

Table of Contents

1. An Introduction to Truth-Making \ 2. The Special Composition Question: 'Physical' Objects \ 3. Other Objects \ 4. Modality \ 5. Properties \ 6. Substratum and Other Theories \ 7. Time \ 8. Persistence \ 9. Causation \ 10. Truth-Maker Reconsidered? \ Bibliography \ Index

Author

Jonathan Tallant is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Nottingham, UK.

[Publisher website]

John Holten, The Readymades

A Press Release

John Holten, The Readymades

This may be of interest. Earlier in the week, I received news of a beautifully-produced novel written by John Holten, The Readymades, with artwork by Darko Dragičević. The publisher's website promotes it as a work that 'uses and abuses a number of literary genres: found texts from the history of modern art, witness testimonies, press releases and the narrative style of art-historical accounts. The novel emerges from one of Félix Fénéon’s infamous three-sentence ‘novels’ – appropriated mini-stories from French newspapers – and from the starting point of Fénéon’s narrative readymade, Holten has extrapolated a whole missing art movement and their contemporary European picaresque saga.' [Read more]

Brian Boyd, Stalking Nabokov

A Press Release from Columbia University Press

Brian Boyd. Stalking Nabokov

The following is a press release from the Columbia University Press website:

Brian Boyd, Stalking Nabokov

At the age of twenty-one, Brian Boyd wrote a thesis on Vladimir Nabokov that the famous author called “brilliant.” After gaining exclusive access to the writer’s archives, he wrote a two-part, award-winning biography, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990) and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991). This collection features essays written by Boyd since completing the biography, incorporating material he gleaned from his research as well as new discoveries and formulations.

Boyd confronts Nabokov’s life, career, and legacy; his art, science, and thought; his subtle humor and puzzle-like storytelling; his complex psychological portraits; and his inheritance from, reworking of, and affinities with Shakespeare, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Machado de Assis. Boyd offers new ways of reading Nabokov’s best English-language works: Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada, and the unparalleled autobiography, Speak, Memory, and he discloses otherwise unknown information about the author’s world. Sharing his personal reflections, Boyd recounts the adventures, hardships, and revelations of researching Nabokov’s biography and his unusual finds in the archives, including materials still awaiting publication. The first to focus on Nabokov’s metaphysics, Boyd cautions against their being used as the key to unlock all of the author’s secrets, showing instead the many other rooms in Nabokov’s castle of fiction that need exploring, such as his humor, narrative invention, and psychological insight into characters and readers alike. Appreciating Nabokov as novelist, memoirist, poet, translator, scientist, and individual, Boyd helps us understand more than ever the author’s multifaceted genius.

Praise for the book

A readable collection on one of the 20th century’s greatest writers, this will be enjoyed by Nabokov fans and students of 20th century literature.

Library Journal

A remarkable read—all readers and scholars of Nabokov will need this book.

Michael Wood, Princeton University

About the Author

Brian Boyd is University Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Auckland. His work on American, Brazilian, English, Greek, Irish, New Zealand, and Russian literature, from epics to comics, has appeared in seventeen languages and has won awards on four continents. He is the author of Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, books on Pale Fire and Ada, and the enormous AdaOnline. He has edited Nabokov’s English fiction, autobiography, butterfly writings, and verse translations and is now editing a collection of the author’s letters to his wife. Also known for his evolutionary and cognitive work, he is the author of On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction and the forthcoming Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets and is coeditor of Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader. He is currently working on a biography of the philosopher Karl Popper.

[Publisher website]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Vladimir Nabokov: Literary Psychologist
• New Nabokov editions from Penguin
• Anthony Uhlmann, Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov
• Author Insults

Friedrich Kittler 1943-2011

Contemporary media theorist and literary critic passes away, aged 68

Friedrich Kittler

Report from media blog, Machinology (thanks to Volker Frick for the link): 'Writing anything after hearing about the death of Friedrich Kittler (1943-2011) is not really easy, even if it surely will boost the academic publishing industry into a range of publications. Somewhere I read him characterized as the “Derrida of media theory” and where the writer (probablyWinthrop-Young or Peters) added that of course, Kittler would like to be called “Foucault of media theory”.' [Read More]

Patti Smith Photography Exhibition

Exhibition at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford from 21 Oct. 19 Feb.

Photographs by Patti Smith. Left: Roberto Bolaño’s chair. Right: Arthur Rimbaud’s utensils.

Photographs by Patti Smith. Left: Virginia Woolf’s bed. Right: Susan Sontag’s grave in Montparnasse Cemetery.

A. O. Scott of the New York Times interviews Patti Smith about her music, her award-winning memoir, Just Kids, and a forthcoming photography exhibition. It's well worth a look: 'Smith said she often organizes her tours around excursions in search of that kind of memorial beauty, seeking out places associated with the writers and artists she admires and with whom she feels a kinship that transcends mortality. The photographs in the Hartford show — black-and-white silver gelatin prints made from Polaroid negatives, small and square and in soft focus — are culled from a collection that documents hundreds of encounters with worldly effects transformed into sacred relics. A fork and a spoon that belonged to Arthur Rimbaud, the French symbolist poet who has been one of Smith’s touchstones forever. Mapplethorpe’s bedroom slippers and the tambourine he made for Smith. A chair that belonged to the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño. William S. Burroughs’s bandanna. A replica of a life mask cast from the features of William Blake.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Patti Smith on Virginia Woolf

Roland Barthes translated into Txt-spk

Artist converts Barthes' seminal The Pleasure of the Text

d PLsUR of d Txt, a translation of Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text

d PLsUR of d Txt, a translation of Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text

d PLsUR of d Txt, a translation of Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text

Artist Nick Davies has embarked on a rather strange and interesting project. With the help of a peer-to-peer online database, Davies has translated Roland Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text into text messaging language: '[d PlsUR of d Txt] is available in an edition of 160 copies (the character limit of a text message or Tweet) and contains the full translated work as well as preface's from Dr Clare Wood and Dr Beverly Plester from the Psychology Dept. of Coventry University.' Appropriately enough, the book is also available electronically. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Roland Barthes and the Preparation of the Novel
• Badmington on Roland Barthes and Mythologies
• Roland Barthes on Cafés
• Reading on Roland Barthes on Reading

Booker Prize 2011: Readability vs. Excellence

How do we judge literary excellence?

A sketch of the British Museum Reading Room

Dan Hartley has written a post on the recent Booker Prize controversy over at his blog, Thinking Blue Guitars: 'This year the Booker judges have caused a stir by claiming they are selecting books with ‘readability’ over those with ‘quality’. Predictably, this has caused a backlash amongst the literati: why, asks Andrew Motion, should readability be assumed to be different in kind from quality? To raise a false opposition between the two is ‘a pernicious and a dangerous thing’. Likewise, literary agent, Andrew Kidd, has announced he will be launching a new literary prize, one whose sole criterion is ‘excellence’.' [Read More]

Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs: Correspondence

Mark Thwaite on Celan and the demands of reading

Photograph: Source

Mark Thwaite writes about poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan in light of Carcanet's Correspondence between Celan and Nelly Sachs (link via Ready Steady Book): 'Celan's words are limpid, but appear so only if we adjust our expectations, allow his words to adjust our expectations: only if we are prepared to listen. Celan’s exactness clashes with what we think of as exact: the everyday is not exact, it is a cliché; realism requires vertiginous originality. But how can one be exact about what is truly unspeakable? One can only write knowing that one approaches and approximates, and that language fails you the while; you run after exactness, but the world gets away and your words fail. Beckett taught us about this failure because he knew failure and writing were synonymous.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Paul Celan, The Meridian: Final Version—Drafts—Materials
• Collecting Paul Celan

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto

A Press Release from the Verso website

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto

Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto

A fascinating dialogue on a new Communist Manifesto from two giants of twentieth century philosophy.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote the central text of “critical theory”, Dialectic of Enlightenment, a measured critique of the Enlightenment reason that, they argued, had resulted in fascism and totalitarianism.

Towards a New Manifesto shows the two philosophers in a uniquely spirited and free-flowing exchange of ideas. This book is a record of their discussions over three weeks in the spring of 1956, recorded with a view to the production of a contemporary version of The Communist Manifesto. A philosophical jam-session in which the two thinkers improvise freely, often wildly, on central themes of their work—theory and practice, labor and leisure, domination and freedom—in a political register found nowhere else in their writing. Amid a careening flux of arguments, aphorisms and asides, in which the trenchant alternates with the reckless, the playful with the ingenuous, positions are swapped and contradictions unheeded, without any compulsion for consistency.

A thrilling example of philosophy in action and a compelling map of a possible passage to a new world. [Read More]

Patience (After Sebald): A Documentary

Interview with director Grant Gee

Grant Gee, known to many for his documentaries on Joy Division (2007) and Radiohead (Meeting People is Easy, 1998), has been interviewed by Bookforum about a new film on W. G. Sebald [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• W. G. Sebald: Writing Pictures
• W. G. Sebald as Academic

Ewald Osers 1917-2011

Thomas Bernhard translator dies, aged 94

Ewald Osers. Photograph: Archív, Právo.

The Prague Post reports that Ewald Osers, translator of Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters: A Comedy and Klaus Wagenbach's Kafka biography, has died (link via Michael Orthofer): 'Osers, born in Prague to a German-speaking Jewish family in 1917, emigrated to England in 1938 after the Munich Agreement and worked for the BBC until his retirement in 1977. He began translating Czech and German poetry in 1937 and went on to publish more than 150 books of literature in translation and several volumes of his own poetry and memoirs. Most English translations of 20th-century Czech poetry — including the works of Jaroslav Seifert, Vítězslav Nezval, Miroslav Holub and Jan Skácel — come from Osers’ pen. He was the recipient of the European Poetry Translation Prize, the Order of Cyril and Methodius in Bulgaria, the Officer’s Cross of Germany, the Macedonian Literature Award and the Medal of Merit of the Czech Republic, among dozens of other honors.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• 'Accursed Questions': Translating Russian Literature
• Life of a Dostoyevsky Translator
• George Craig, Writing Beckett's Letters

W. G. Sebald as Academic

Academia, literary fame and post-war Germany's culture of silence

W. G. Sebald

Uwe Schütte, director of German studies at Aston University. discusses his acquaintance with W. G. Sebald in the Times Higher Education: 'From the late 1970s, the "angry young academic" underwent quite a transformation, with Sebald now focusing his critical attention on empathetic discussions of writers who had been marginalised or ignored by mainstream German studies. Sebald never wrote an essay - let alone a book - on any of the "biggies" of German literature: Goethe, Thomas Mann, Brecht just don't feature, although Kafka, himself an outsider figure, is a major interest. Rather, he concerned himself with "minor poets" such as the autodidact Herbert Achternbusch, the schizophrenic poet Ernst Herbeck, the Austrian-Jewish Holocaust survivor Jean Améry - writers, who in his view wrote "against" the prevalent conception of culture and/or literature.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• W. G. Sebald: Writing Pictures
• W. G. Sebald Interviewed on Bookworm
• Coetzee on Sebald and the Uncanny
• James Wood on Sebald's Austerlitz

Will Spurious win the Not the Booker Prize 2011?

Your chance to vote

Lars Iyer, Spurious

Lars Iyer's first book, Spurious, has been nominated to receive The Guardian's Not The Booker Prize 2011. But will it win? You might have the deciding vote on this one.

If you enjoyed Spurious, you can vote for it on The Guardian website. Details on how to vote can be found on Lars Iyer's website. [Read More]

The deadline is midnight (GMT) on 17 October.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Lars Iyer, Spurious
• Literary influences in Lars Iyer's Spurious
• Lars Iyer talks to Biblioklept
• Lars Iyer on Writing, Reading and Thinking

George Hunka on Samuel Beckett and Politics

On political concerns in Beckett's later plays

Samuel Beckett directing a production of Warten auf Godot in Germany

In a recent post at Superfluities Redux, George Hunka shares his personal impressions on Samuel Beckett's theatre: 'Towards the end of his playwriting career, with his final two plays Catastrophe and What Where, Beckett turned to more explicitly political concerns which echoed his own public activities in the fight against apartheid in South Africa and the suppression of individual thought and expression in the countries of the Eastern Bloc. The director of the first play and the torturer of the second suggest the superego of personal certainty which seeks to shape a world; this certainty always leads to the manipulation and destruction of the Other. In this, Beckett explores the dangers of political power, imperial colonialism, and cultural adventurism writ large; in Catastrophe, Beckett’s setting of the play in a theatre (and Catastrophe is one of the few late plays that take place in a specific locale) implicates the author in arranging and manipulating the mute individual at the mercy of the director, his assistant, and the lighting designer.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

Julian Barnes on Memory and Imagination

An extract from Nothing to be Frightened of

Julian Barnes

Maud Newton has quoted a passage from Julian Barnes' Nothing to be Frightened of: 'For the young — and especially the young writer — memory and imagination are quite distinct, and of different categories. In a typical first novel, there will be moments of unmediated memory (typically, that unforgettable sexual embarrassment), moments where the imagination has worked to transfigure a memory (perhaps that chapter in which the protagonist learns some lesson about life, whereas in the original the novelist-to-be failed to learn anything), and moments when, to the writer’s astonishment, the imagination catches a sudden upcurrent and the weightless, wonderful soaring that is the basis for the fiction delightingly happens.' [Read More]

J. M. Coetzee archive acquired by Texas

Manuscript materials to be housed at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas

J. M. Coetzee. Taken at the The University of Texas in Austin, May 2010. Photograph: Marsha Miller.

From the Harry Ransom Center website: 'The Ransom Center has acquired the archive of Nobel Prize-winning writer and University of Texas at Austin alumnus J. M. Coetzee. Spanning more than 50 years, the archive traces the author’s life and career from 1956 through the present.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Video Interview with J. M. Coetzee
• J. M. Coetzee and Human Suffering
• J. M. Coetzee on Philip Roth's Nemesis
• McGrath on Coetzee's Master of Petersburg
• Coetzee on Sebald and the Uncanny
• Coetzee's Summertime: A Disembodied Man
• J. M. Coetzee on Beckett's Letters
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers

Erica Heller on Catch-22

On reading Joseph Heller's American masterpiece for the first time

Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22

Erica Heller, daughter of Joseph Heller, tells The Telegraph about her experience of reading Catch-22 for the first time: 'Erica Heller was nine when her father’s great novel, Catch-22, was published. On its 50th anniversary she describes how it changed her life – and why she is reading it for the first time.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Erica Heller, Yossarian Slept Here

Paul Celan, The Meridian: Final Version—Drafts—Materials

A new volume from Stanford University Press

Stephen Mitchelmore reviews The Meridian over at This Space, a speech delivered by Paul Celan on receiving the Georg Büchner Prize for literature. The volume is published by Stanford University Press, and includes drafts and materials alongside the final version of the text. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Collecting Paul Celan

James Wood on Sebald's Austerlitz

New article available to read online

Elise Blackwell has pointed me in the direction of a recent article on W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz, published in the 6 October issue of London Review of Books (PDF) [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• W. G. Sebald interviewed on Bookworm
• W. G. Sebald: Writing Pictures
• Coetzee on Sebald and the Uncanny
• Will Self on Sebald and the Holocaust
• W. G. Sebald's Writing Style

Second volume of Beckett Letters published

Ruadhán Mac Cormaic attends the official launch

Beckett during a signing at an opening night in 1970. Photographs: WA Dudley/Getty

The Irish Times review the second volume of Samuel Beckett's Letters, spanning the years 1941-1956:

The official launch of The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1941-1956, the second volume in a colossal scholarly project set in train two decades ago, was a multinational occasion. It was a celebration of Beckett’s own gift for moving between cultures and of the cross-border collaboration – French, Irish, American, British – behind the new book.

For George Craig, a co-editor and translator on the project, it was the culmination of a long effort that brought him “passion, excitement and joy”. It began in 1985, when Samuel Beckett authorised Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck to edit his letters. They gathered and consulted more than 15,000 pieces of correspondence in public and private hands, and the new collection is the second of four planned volumes.

“This vast body of words could have two effects on you: one is to crush you absolutely, the other is to make you feel more and more attached to the business of dealing with it,” Craig reflected.

So which was it? “I liked him more at the end. I found that all those qualities that I thought I’d seen in him actually are his qualities, and he retained them until the end. A moral generosity. An enormous depth of loyalty. And a total refusal to see fame as adding anything of value." [Read More]

Ruadhán Mac Cormaic, 'The search for fewest possible words: Beckett letters shed light on artist who shunned fame'

The Irish Times, 1 October 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• George Craig, Writing Beckett's Letters
• The Irish Times publishes Beckett Letters
• Samuel Beckett in Paris
• Beckett's Handwriting
• The Beckett Estate: An Interview with Edward Beckett
• Writers: Samuel Beckett

David Cronenberg on A Dangerous Method

Cronenberg on psychoanalysis and Keira Knightley

David Cronenberg

Legendary film critic Amy Taubin interviews David Cronenberg about A Dangerous Method for the September/October issue of Film Comment [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method: Official Trailer (HD)
• David Cronenberg on Beckett
• David Cronenberg on J. G. Ballard
• David Cronenberg to direct DeLillo's Cosmopolis

Robert Wilson presents Brecht's Threepenny Opera

Sara Krulwich photographs the performance

Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera. Photograph: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

The New York Times website is featuring photographs of Robert Wilson's recent production of Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. The performance was held at the Howard Gilman Opera House of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. [See more]

Tomas Transtromer wins Nobel Prize for Literature 2011

Prestigious award granted to Swedish poet

Tomas Transtromer. Photograph: Maja Suslin/European Pressphoto Agency

From the New York Times: 'Tomas Transtromer, a Swedish poet whose sometimes bleak but graceful work explores themes of isolation, emotion and identity while remaining rooted in the commonplace, won the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Will Cormac McCarthy win the Nobel Prize for Literature?

Who is Jean-Paul Riopelle?

Artist, painter, and friend of Alberto Giacometti and Samuel Beckett

Jean-Paul Riopelle, 'La Forêt Ardente' (1955)

Daily Art Fixx celebrates the life and work of artist Jean-Paul Riopelle:

Born on October 7, 1923 in Montreal, Canada, Jean-Paul Riopelle is one of Canada’s most famous painters. Riopelle studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montreal in 1942, and then at the École du Meuble, graduating in 1945. He studied with Paul-Émile Borduas under whose direction Riopelle created his first abstract painting.

Riopelle was a member of a group of writers and artists in Quebec called the Automatistes, led by Borduas, and was a signer of the Refus global manifesto. In 1946 he traveled to France, where he returned and settled the following year. Pioneering a style of painting where large quantities of coloured paints were thickly applied to the canvas with a trowel, Riopelle gained increasing success and immersion in the Parisian cultural scene. From 1949, he had numerous solo exhibitions in Canada, France, Italy, Spain, England, the United States and Sweden. He was represented in New York and participated in the biennials of contemporary art in Venice (1954) and Sao Paulo (1955). He spent his evenings in Paris bistros with friends including playwright Samuel Beckett and artist Alberto Giacometti. [Read More]

London Unfurled iPad app

Will Self contributes to Matteo Pericoli's iPad app

Screenshots from the London Unfurled iPad app

An announcement from the recently re-designed Will Self website: 'Will Self has contributed to Matteo Pericoli’s recently launched London Unfurled iPad app, providing commentary on Pericoli’s drawings of south London. / There is also the London Unfurled book featuring a foreword by Will if you prefer paper to iPad.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Documentary: London Perambulator (2009)
• Writers: Will Self

Will Self on the Symphony and the Novel

Self talks about the historical development of literature and classical music

Gustav Mahler. Photograph: Picture-Alliance/Österr

On The Guardian website, Will Self traces the development of the novel alongside that of the musical symphony. For two hundred years the two artistic forms appear analogous to one another: 'The search for motifs, or themes, the creation of an alternative world in words, the struggle for authenticity of narrative voice, the counterpointing of different protagonists' views – these are key artistic objectives shared by the novelist and the symphonist, and not to anything like the same degree by other musical and literary practitioners. Indeed, I'd go further: the symphonist and the novelist have more in common with each other than they do with others working in their own respective art forms. ' But whereas music could be argued to have exceeded the symphonic form, moving into greater realms of experimentation, Self suggests that literature remains stalled in the past. Self is appearing at the Notes & Letters festival at Kings Place at 5pm on Saturday 8 October. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Will Self
• Will Self on Literature and Visual Arts
• Will Self on Bob Dylan

László Krasznahorkai and Max Neumann, Animalinside

Read an excerpt from an edition by The Cahiers Series

László Krasznahorkai and Max Neumann's Animalinside

The New York Review of Books online blog has published a snippet from Animalinside, a collaboration between writer László Krasznahorkai and illustrative artist Max Neumann. Colm Tóibín describes the process: 'The writer worked first from one of Neumann’s images and then Neumann, spurred on in turn by the words, made the rest of the images to which Krasznahorkai, his mind let loose by the captured visuals, responded by writing more texts.' Animalinside is published jointly by the Center for Writers and Translators of The American University of Paris, Sylph Editions, and New Directions press, as number 14 of the Cahiers series. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Praise for The Cahiers Series
• George Craig, Writing Beckett's Letters

David Winters on Shane Weller's Modernism and Nihilism

On Weller's contribution to Palgrave's 'Modernism and...' series

Osip Brik by Aleksandr Mikhajlovich Rodchenko © DACS 2005

David Winters reviews Shane Weller's recent study, Modernism and Nihilism for Ready Steady Book: 'To consider the concept of nihilism, Simon Critchley once remarked, is to take up the trail of ‘Ariadne’s thread’, a theoretical route through the labyrinth of history. For Critchley, the story of nihilism is the story of what it means to be modern, and to read the philology of nihilism, of the nihil, is to look through a lens at modernity’s underside. Shane Weller’s survey of the web of relations between Modernism and Nihilism proceeds from the same supposition. His book unpicks the thread where it’s at its most knotted, in the high modernist literatures of the early twentieth century. For Weller, what’s at work in the works of the modernists – from Tzara to Kafka to Cioran – is a discursive puzzle for which ‘nihilism’ would seem to be the key, the master term that could unlock and make sense of the modern. Yet the thrust of his thesis is the fact that it fails to do so; the way that whatever it touches is rendered resistant to interpretation. So, on the one hand, thought and talk about ‘nihilism’ is ubiquitous across modern culture: wherever the modernist moment is, nihilism sits alongside (or inside) it. On the other, modernism proves unable to reduce nihilism to its propaedeutic, its explanatory toolkit. Rather, nihilism is what haunts modernism, as its ghost or double, a tense co-presence forever unsettling its meanings.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Shane Weller, Modernism and Nihilism
• Travels in Nihilon: Critchley on Beckett and Adorno