World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
THU—SAT 12—6 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
1993, English
Softcover, 246 pages, 21 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Museum of Contemporary Art / Sydney
$45.00 - In stock -
Rare 1993 exhibition book published to accompany "La Cita Transcultural: Art from Latin America", a curatorial project by Nelly Richard, 9 March – 13 June 1993, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) Sydney, featuring the work of Luis F Benedit, Juan Davila, Eugenio Dittborn, Arturo Duclos, Flavio Garciandia and the essays of Nestor Garcia Canclini, Ticio Escobar, Celeste Olalquiaga, Nelly Richard, Osvaldo Sanchez.
This major exhibition of artists from Latin America questioned the nostalgic and stereotypical view of Latin America as an exotic and primitive culture. It set up a dialogue between five artists and five authors, emphasising the dislocation, appropriation and reconversion of multiple cultural and artistic references. Through the development of these themes, hybrid identities, signs and cultures were allowed to emerge in the artists’ practice, reflecting the authors’ provisional relationships with language and identity.
This exhibition was the outcome of a dialogue between critic Nelly Richard and artist Juan Davila that began in the early 1980s. Davila was based in Melbourne, but continued to be involved with and explore political and cultural issues in his home country of Chile. Davila and Richard’s discussions evolved from the conflicts and similarities between these greatly divergent cultures with different indigenous and colonial histories. It also considered the larger project of developing a post-colonial understanding of art across a diversity of contexts and regions, acknowledging the heterogeneity of all culture and the complex relationships between centre and periphery.
La Cita Transcultural aimed to initiate an ongoing dialogue and exchange with artists in Chile, Cuba, Argentina and other countries in Latin America.
Very Good copy with residue of old bookshop sticker to back cover. Previous owner's name to title page, Australian curator/author Linda Michael.
1985, English
Softcover, 328 pages, 22.8 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Blackwell / Cambridge
$35.00 - In stock -
First 1986 printing.
Julia Kristeva is a theorist and has been acclaimed for her work in linguistics, psychoanalysis, literary and political theory. This is an introduction to her work in English, containing a range of essays from all phases of her career.
Julia Kristeva is one of Europe's most brilliant and original theorists, widely acclaimed for her work in such diverse areas as linguistics, psychoanalysis, literary and political theory. The Kristeva Reader is a fully-comprehensive, easily accessible introduction to her work in English, containing a wide range of essays from all phases of Kristeva's career. The essays have been carefully selected as representative of the three main areas of her writing - semiotics, psychoanalysis and political theory - and each is prefaced by a clear, instructive introduction.
Julia Kristeva, internationally known psychoanalyst and critic, is Professor of Linguistics at the University de Paris VII. She has hosted a French television series and is the author of many critically acclaimed books published by Columbia University Press in translation, including Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature and the novel, Possessions.
"It has been apprarent for some time that Julia Kristeva has inherited the intellectual throne left vacant by the death of Simone de Beauvoir."—Elaine Showalter
Good copy with general wear and page tanning.
1982, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 154 pages, 23.5 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Syracuse University Press / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition.
"In this groundbreaking, original study, J. H. Matthews, "clearly the chief scholarly explicator of surrealism today," according to Contemporary Literature, shows how the surrealists' goals and the imaginative freedom of mind are fused and diffused in the poet's creative world. Hallucination, game-playing, experimental research, and the irrational which nurtures new ways of poetical expression are all interwoven.
Out of their eagerness to share the benefits they ascribed to mental disturbance surrealists developed an approach to poetic technique which capitalized on the free association of the unconscious mind without undermining the sanity of the poets themselves.
Matthews discusses early surrealist interest in psychosis, hysteria, and insanity. This interest underlies such major works as André Breton's Nadja and Breton's and Paul Eluard's The Immaculate Conception. It is in the latter text that the issue of insanity and its relationship to poetic activity is most clearly revealed as essential to the surrealist enterprise. Also included here are chapters on insanity's poetic simulation and possession.
Matthews' work is important to anyone interested in poetry, the unconscious, and the history of twentieth-century ideas, as well as to scholars of surrealism.
Karol Baron, a Czech surrealist artist, has provided six original drawings especially for this book."—Dust jacket.
J. H. Matthews is a member of the committee appointed by the French government's Centre National de la Recherche scientifique to establish a center in Paris for documenting world-wide surrealism. He is American correspondent for Edda and Gradiva (Brussels), Phases (Paris), and Sud (Marseilles), magazines devoted to vanguard poetry and art. In 1977 the University of Wales conferred upon him its D. Litt., in recognition of his work on surrealism.
Born in Swansea, Wales, J. H. Matthews has been Professor of French at Syracuse University and editor of Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Foreign Literatures since 1965. He has edited a selection of stories by Guy de Maupassant (1959) as well as two special issues of La Revue des Lettres Modernes, and is the author of Les deux Zola (1957) and The Inner Dream: Céline as Novelist (1978) and numerous articles on nineteenth-and twentieth-century French literature.
His interest in surrealism has led him to write Péret's Score/Vingt Poèmes de Benjamin Péret
(1965); An Introduction to Surrealism (1965); An Anthology of French Surrealist Poetry (1966); Surrealism and the Novel (1966); André Breton (1967); Surrealist Poetry in France (1969); Surrealism and Film (1971); Theatre in Dada and Surrealism (1974); Benjamin Péret (1975); and The Custom-House of Desire: A Half-Century of Surrealist Short Stories (1975). He is also the author of Toward the Poetics of Surrealism (1976); Le thé-âtre de Raymond Roussel: une énigme (1977); The Imagery of Surrealism (1977); and Surrealism and American Feature Films (1979).
VG copy in VG dust jacket with light tanning/age.
2007, English
Softcover, 99 pages, 23 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Miguel Abreu Gallery / New York
$190.00 - In stock -
Incredible, long out-of-print catalogue published on the occasion of Agapē, organized by Alex Waterman at Miguel Abreu Gallery June 3 – July 28, 2007, an exhibition of experimental music scores and an accompanying concert series that will address aspects of the social acts of translation and collective interpretation in musical performance. The show will feature a sequence of scores marking the evolution of notation in music, spanning from Anna Magdalena Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites to the long awaited Trios WHITE ON WHITE by Robert Ashley (1963). Printed by Will Holder in consultation with Alex Waterman, this work will be, for the first time, both formed and performed as originally intended by Ashley.
Throughout the two-month event, each score appearing on the gallery walls will be performed in a series of scheduled concerts. The performances will engage the task of reading in relation to the various acts of writing, composing, translating, and committing works to memory. The aural tradition and story-telling will also be explored in addition to issues pertaining to editing, copying, and the transmission /performance of scores and written words. On July 28th, the exhibition will close with The Bachelor Party, an evening led by Will Holder celebrating the 120th birthday of Marcel Duchamp.
Among Alex Waterman’s guests will be experimental cellist, Charles Curtis; Fluxus artist, Alison Knowles; language poet and political economist, Bruce Andrews; writers, designers and publishers, Will Holder and Stuart Bailey; poet and sound artist, Chris Mann as well as composers Christian Wolff, Anthony Coleman, Pauline Oliveros and Robert Ashley.
With contributions by Robert Ashley, Alex Waterman, Bruce Andrews, John Law, Charles Curtis, Elaine Radigue, Christian Wolff, The Brothers Grimm, Herbert Read, Frances Stark, James Saunders, Cornelius Cardew, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Will Holder, Alvin Lucier, Chris Mann and others.
"Agape is the drawing together of poets, philosophers, writers, composers, and musicians in an attempt to address the role of reading as a social act through an exhibition and concert series."—from the preface by Alex Waterman
"[A] composition is not an end product, not in itself a useful commodity. The end-product of an artist’s work, the ‘useful commodity’ in the production of which he plays a role, is ideological influence… The production of ideological influence is highly socialized involving (in the case of music), performers, critics, impresarios, agents, managers, etc., and above all (and this is the artist’s real ‘means of production’) an audience…"—Cornelius Cardew
Very Good copy. Tanning to page edges due to paper type.
1992, English
Softcover, 460 pages, 23.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Manchester University Press / Manchester
$50.00 - In stock -
First 1992 edition, long out-of-print.
In 1846, Edgar Allen Poe wrote that 'the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the world'. The conjuction of death, art and femininity forms a rich and disturbing strata of Western culture, explored here in fascinating detail by Elisabeth Bronfen. Her examples range from Carmen to Little Nell, from Wuthering Heights to Vertigo, from Snow White to Frankenstein. The text is richly illustrated throughout with thirty-seven paintings and photographs.
The argument that this book presents is that narrative and visual representations of death can be read as symptoms of our culture and because the feminine body is culturally constructed as the superlative site of "other" and "not me", culture uses art to dream the deaths of beautiful women.
'Aside from the originality-or fearful finality -of its arguments, the book will be invaluable as an introduction to the use of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of cultural texts'—New Statesman & Society
'[Death] faces a similar taboo in our century to the one that sex suffered in the last... [Bronfen] addresses an important silence in contemporary culture'—The Times
Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich
Good copy with some creasing (spine, corners).
1996, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 214 pages, 20.5 x 14.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Columbia University Press / New York
$50.00 - Out of stock
Long considered the foremost American Marxist theorist, Fredric Jameson continues his investigation of postmodernism under late capitalism in The Seeds of Time. In three parts Jameson presents the problem of Utopia, attempting to diagnose the cultural present and to open a perspective on the future of a world that is all but impossible to predict with any certainty - "a telling of the future", as Jameson calls it, "with an imperfect deck". "The Antinomies of Postmodernity" highlights the seemingly unresolvable paradoxes of intellectual debate in the age of postmodernity. Jameson suggests that these paradoxes revolve around the idea of "nature", the terms of antifoundationalism and antiessentialism, and contemporary society's inability or refusal to consider the idea of Utopia. The chapter attempts to sketch the "unrepresentable exterior" of these debates - which is the locus of the future according to Jameson. In "Utopia, Modernism, and Death", Jameson meditates on the fascinating and terrifying Utopian fiction Chevengur, written in the 1920s by the Soviet author Andrei Platonov. He discusses the unique character of Utopian visions in the Second World of communism, where commodity fetishism has not had as profound an effect on social relations as we have seen in the First World under late capitalism. The Seeds of Time continues in "The Constraints of Postmodernism" with an examination of contemporary architectural trends, in an attempt to suggest the limits of the postmodern. By delineating these limits, Jameson stakes out a prediction of the boundaries of postmodernity - the "unrepresentable exterior" approached in Part One - which we need to recognize and surpass.
"Jameson remains heedless of trendy appeals for politically minded academics to remake themselves as 'public intellectuals'.... The implicit subject of "The Seeds of Time" is timely indeed: our collective failure of historical imagination."—"The Nation"
Fine first hardcover edition.
2013, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 336 pages, 20.8 x 13.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Verso / London
$40.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition of Fredric Jameson's The Antinomies of Realism, a history of the nineteenth-century realist novel and its legacy told without a glimmer of nostalgia for artistic achievements that the movement of history makes it impossible to recreate. The works of Zola, Tolstoy, Perez Galdos, and George Eliot are in the most profound sense inimitable, yet continue to dominate the novel form to this day. Novels to emerge since struggle to reconcile the social conditions of their own creation with the history of this mode of writing: the so-called modernist novel is one attempted solution to this conflict, as is the ever-more impoverished variety of commercial narratives - what today's book reviewers dub "serious novels," which are an attempt at the impossible endeavor to roll back the past.
Fredric Jameson examines the most influential theories of artistic and literary realism, approaching the subject himself in terms of the social and historical preconditions for realism's emergence. The realist novel combined an attention to the body and its states of feeling with a focus on the quest for individual realization within the confines of history.
In contemporary writing, other forms of representation - for which the term "postmodern" is too glib - have become visible: for example, in the historical fiction of Hilary Mantel or the stylistic plurality of David Mitchell's novels. Contemporary fiction is shown to be conducting startling experiments in the representation of new realities of a global social totality, modern technological warfare, and historical developments that, although they saturate every corner of our lives, only become apparent on rare occasions and by way of the strangest formal and artistic devices.
In a coda, Jameson explains how "realistic" narratives survived the end of classical realism. In effect, he provides an argument for the serious study of popular fiction and mass culture that transcends lazy journalism and the easy platitudes of recent cultural studies.
"Fredric Jameson is America's leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction."—Terry Eagleton
1984, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 100 pages, 22 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Bard College / New York
$35.00 - In stock -
Rare 1984 issue of the small press photocopied contemporary music magazine issued by the Music Department of Bard College, edited by Sarah Johnson. Each issue with wraparound covers listing a calendar of events (films, concerts, theatre), the contents packed with essays, transcribed lectures, conversations, historical articles, record reviews, reading lists, compositions, visual scores, text art, sound poetry, and various artworks, facsimiles and reproductions.
G—VG copy with general tanning, wear and foxing.
1984, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 100 pages, 22 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Bard College / New York
$35.00 - In stock -
Rare 1984 issue of the small press photocopied contemporary music magazine issued by the Music Department of Bard College, edited by Sarah Johnson. Each issue with wraparound covers listing a calendar of events (films, concerts, theatre), the contents packed with essays, transcribed lectures, conversations, historical articles, record reviews, reading lists, compositions, visual scores, text art, sound poetry, and various artworks, facsimiles and reproductions.
VG copy with general tanning, wear and foxing.
1981, English
Softcover, 126 pages, 20 x 13 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$15.00 - Out of stock
1981 Penguin paperback edition of Angela Carter's 1979 classic The Bloody Chamber, a feminist retelling of favourite fairy tales interwoven by a master of seductive, luminous storytelling.
From the lairs of the fantastical and fabular and from the domains of the unconscious's mysteries...
Lie the brides in the Bloody Chamber — Hunts unwillingly the Queen of the Vampires — Slips Red Riding Hood into the arms of the Wolf — Pimps our Puss-in-Boots for his lustful master...
In tales that glitter and haunt – strange nuggets from a writer whose wayward pen spills forth stylish, erotic, nightmarish jewels of prose – the old fairy stories live and breathe again, subtly altered, subtly changed.
"She writes a prose that lends itself to magnificent set pieces of fastidious sensuality...dreams, myths, fairy tales, metamorphoses, the unruly unconscious, epic journeys and a highly sensual celebration of sexuality in both its most joyous and darkest manifestations"—Ian McEwan, author of The Child in Time
"The boldest of English women writers"—Lorna Sage
"The most stylish English prose writer of her generation"—John Mortimer
Angela Olive Pearce (formerly Carter, 1940—1992), who published under the name Angela Carter, was an English novelist, short story writer, poet, and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, and picaresque works. She is mainly known for her book The Bloody Chamber (1979). In 1984, her short story "The Company of Wolves" was adapted into a film of the same name. In 2008, The Times ranked Carter tenth in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945"
Very Good copy.
2024, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 17.7 x 12.3 cm
Published by
un / Naarm
$30.00 - In stock -
Double issue un 18.4 / un 18.5
un 18.3 — Sabaar
Edited by Nadia Refaei
Contributions by Caine Chennatt, Dean Greeno, Hasib Hourani and Jeanine Hourani, Monica Rani Rudhar, Grace Gamage, Kiera Brew Kurec, Jess Clifford, Brooke Pou, Sara Jajou, Juliette Berkeley, Ronen Jafari, Nadia Refaei.
un 18.4 — good grief
Edited by Olivia Koh
Contributions by Zainab Hikmet and Anna Emina El Samad, Peta Clancy and Olivia Koh, Mihret Kebede, Lana Nguyen, Ellen van Neerven, Benjamin Bannan, Jacqui Shelton, Lily Golightly and Jemi Gale, Laniyuk, Tristen Harwood, Tamsen Hopkinson, Olivia Koh.
1985, English
Softcover, 385 pages, 20.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Oxford University Press / New York
$25.00 - In stock -
First 1985 Oxford edition.
"Elaine Scarry has written an extraordinary book: large-spirited, heroically truthful. A necessary book."—Susan Sontag
"No one, with the exception of Freud, more persistently brings one back to the reality of the body.... a richly original, provocative book which makes one reconsider torture, war, and creativity from a new perspective."—Anthony Storr, Washington Post Book World
"Brilliant, ambitious and controversial... an all-encompassing discourse on creativity, imagination and the distribution of power."—Gwen Yourgrau, Los Angeles Times Book Review
The Body in Pain is a profoundly original meditation on the vulnerability of the human body and the literary, political, philosophical, medical, and religious vocabularies used to describe it. Elaine Scarry bases her analysis on a wide array of sources, including literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, and the writings of such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, and Kissinger. The author begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility, noting not only the difficulty of describing pain, but its ability to destroy a sufferer's language. She then analyzes the political consequences of deliberately inflicted pain, particularly in cases of war and torture, showing how regimes "unmake" an individual's world in their exercise of power. From the actions that "unmake" the world Scarry turns to a discussion of actions that "make" the world-the acts of creativity that produce language and cultural artifacts.
Elaine Scarry is William T. Fitts, Jr., Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
"In its breadth and humaneness of vision, in the density and richness of its prose, above all in the compelling nature of its argument, this is indeed an extraordinary book."—Susan Rubin Suleiman, The New York Times Book Review
"A brilliant and difficult book... Scarry's compassionate linguistics docu- ments how [the] bridge between torturer and victim is cut."—Michael Ignatieff, The New Republic
Very Good copy, tanning to pages, light marking to block edges.
2008, English
Softcover, 150 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
Published by
Solar Books / US
$45.00 - In stock -
The work of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) remains a constant source of seminal inspiration, astonishment and provocation across contemporary visual art, film, performance, choreography, digital media, and critical theory, throughout the entire world.
In Artaud: Terminal Curses, Stephen Barber explores the newly-revealed set of 406 notebooks which Artaud used in the final years of his life in Paris, after his release from a decade of asylum-incarceration, to carry through his projects for corporeal transformation and social refusal. Artaud’s notebooks are designed as an autonomous work in their own right, through which he distils his preeminent preoccupations: the envisioning of a new, organ-less human anatomy (crucial for Deleuze and Guattari’s theoretical work), his conception of the time and space of gesture, his raw fury against society and all of its manifestions, his visualization of a ruined and supplanted natural and urban world, his intensive confrontation between text and image, and his reflections on the fluctuationg parameters of life and death. Those preoccupations retrospectively illuminate Artaud’s earlier Surrealist work and theories of film and performance.
With 24 pages of illustrations, this eye-opening and original book will be of major significance for all readers interested in the extreme zones of art, literature and media, as well as providing critical new revelations for those engaged with Artaud’s work.
1999, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 24 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Creation Books / London
The Tears Corporation / London
$40.00 - Out of stock
Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) remains the most inspirational, provocative and challenging figure in world-wide contemporary culture. His trajectory extends from the Surrealist movement, to the Theatre of Cruelty, to the lunatic asylums of France, and finally back to Paris and the most astonishing period of his work.
For the first time, the book gives a full and authoritative account of Artaud's film projects, and his conception of Surrealist cinema. It examines his unique series of drawings of the fragmented human body, begun in the ward of a lunatic asylum and finished in a state of furious liberation. Finally, the book captures Artaud's ultimate experiment with the screaming body in the form of his censored recording To Have Done With The Judgement Of God - an experiment which is unprecedented in the history of art, and which ultimately decimates that history.
The Screaming Body is an essential resource and inspiration for those engaged in creating the definitive culture of our time, in film, art, music and writing.
Good copy, some wear to cover otherwise VG throughout rest.
1986, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 22.86 x 15.24 cm
Published by
University of Wisconsin Press / Madison
$55.00 - In stock -
Winner of France's 2004 Prix de Flore for his memoir "The Romanian: Story of an Obsession," Bruce Benderson has gained international respect for his controversial opinions and original take on contemporary society. In this collection of essays, Benderson directs his exceptional powers of observation toward some of the most debated, as well as some of the most neglected, issues of our day.
In "Sex and Isolation," readers will encounter eccentric street people, Latin American literary geniuses, a French cabaret owner, a transvestite performer, and many other unusual characters; they'll visit subcultures rarely described in writing and be treated to Benderson's iconoclastic opinions about culture in former and contemporary urban society. Whether proposing new theories about the relationship between art, entertainment, and sex, analyzing the rise of the Internet and the disappearance of public space, or considering how religion and sexual identity interact, each essay demonstrates sharp wit, surprising insight and some startling intellectual positions.
This is the first American volume of Benderson's collected essays, featuring both new work and some of his best-known writings, including his famous essay "Toward the New Degeneracy." Outstanding University Press Book selection, "Foreword Magazine"
1988, English
Softcover, 368 pages, 16 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Cornell University Press / New York
$20.00 - In stock -
"Lukacher is one of the most brilliant and authoritative of young critics and theorists working in the post-structuralist mode. I think Primal Scenes is a book of great importance and will take a significant place within the present field of thinking about literature."—J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine
Primal Scenes is concerned with those elements in the thought of Freud and Heidegger which make us continue to regard them as our contemporaries. It seeks to reassert their radical potential, which, the author believes, has been minimized as critics celebrate the radicality of Lacan, Derrida, and others. Drawing heavily on Freud's idea of the primal scene and Heidegger's idea of the history of Being, Lukacher de- lineates his own notion of the primal scene in the context of deconstruction and the new historicism.
In the first part of the book, which culminates in a reading of Henry James's Turn of the Screw, Lukacher provides a theoretical base for his interdisciplinary mode of interpretation. A series of intertextual "primal scenes" from the works of Heidegger and Derrida, Hegel and Shakespeare, Marx and Balzac, and Freud and Dickens exemplifies the interplay of recollection and reconstruction, memory and imagina- tion, which underlies the discourses of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.
"An important study which offers new possibilities for those attempt- ing to forge a path between deconstruction and Marxist or feminist criticism. Lukacher is an inquisitive and rigorous thinker with an im- pressive range of knowledge. A difficult and sometimes troubling book, Primal Scenes is well worth the effort it requires."—Comparative Literature
"In this complexly argued, learned, and suggestive work, Lukacher is concerned with memory, ancestry, and forgetting in literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. No summary can do justice to his recon- ceptualization of remembering, which quite transforms what used to be thought of, quite unproblematically, as 'influence.'"—Choice
"Ned Lukacher... announces himself as a major figure in contemporary criticism with Primal Scenes." World Literature Today
NED LUKACHER teaches the history of literary criticism in the Department of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
VG copy.
1999, English
Softcover, 280 pages, 23.2 x 16.6 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of California Press / Berkley
$40.00 - In stock -
Tyrus Miller breaks new ground in this study of early twentieth-century literary and artistic culture. Whereas modernism studies have generally concentrated on the vital early phases of the modernist revolt, Miller focuses on the turbulent later years of the 1920s and 1930s, tracking the dissolution of modernism in the interwar years.
In the post-World War I reconstruction and the worldwide crisis that followed, Miller argues, new technological media and the social forces of mass politics opened fault lines in individual and collective experience, undermining the cultural bases of the modernist movement. He shows how late modernists attempted to discover ways of occupying this new and often dangerous cultural space. In doing so they laid bare the ruin of the modernist aesthetic at the same time as they transcended its limits.
In his wide-ranging theoretical and historical discussion, Miller relates developments in literary culture to tendencies in the visual arts, cultural and political criticism, mass culture, and social history. He excavates Wyndham Lewis's hidden borrowings from Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer; situates Djuna Barnes between the imagery of haute couture and the intellectualism of Duchamp; uncovers Beckett's affinities with Giacometti's surrealist sculptures and the Bolshevik clowns Bim-Bom; and considers Mina Loy as both visionary writer and designer of decorative lampshades. Miller's lively and engaging readings of culture in this turbulent period reveal its surprising anticipation of our own postmodernity.
VG copy, first ed.
1992, English
Softcover, 302 pages, 24 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Cornell University Press / New York
$100.00 - In stock -
First 1992 edition.
"This brilliant and substantial study will be required reading for critics of Gothic literature and for feminist theorists. Unlike other psychoanalytic readers who localize the 'horror' in Gothic fiction by interpreting it as an effect of repressed anxiety about motherhood or genital sexuality, Massé regards the horror as systemic and actual, and for this reason her study is far more radical, comprehensive, and satisfying. In the Name of Love is challenging and engaging reading that opens out onto new critical territory all the way through." -Claudia L. Johnson, Marquette University
"Massé handles an important topic in a thorough, clear, and interesting fashion. I especially liked the book's combination of theoretical analysis and original readings of texts. In the Name of Love will make a significant contribution in all the areas it treats-feminism, psychoanalysis, and literature."-Shirley Nelson Garner, Department of English, University of Minnesota
The Gothic woman is taught to believe that self-abnegation will be rewarded by love; her experience clearly proves otherwise. Although Gothic fiction has characteristically been written by and for women, this sophisticated and venturesome book is one of the first to examine the contradictions of the Gothic pact in the light of contemporary feminist and psychoanalytic theory. Michelle A. Massé looks at selected British and American novels from the eighteenth century to the present, focusing on the theme of masochism as an element of women's identity. Approaching the Gothic novel by way of psychoanalysis, she also identifies a Gothic plot within psychoanalytic theory itself.
In fiction that ranges from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, and Daphne de Maurier's Rebecca to Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills, Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle, and Pauline Réage's Story of O, Massé explores the narrative of women being trained to embrace their own subordination. She begins by asserting that the stylistic and structural repetitions of the Gothic constitute both symptoms of this trauma and attempts to work it through. Massé delineates the pattern of women's ego formation in the courtship plot and discusses what she calls "marital Gothic." She then addresses the complicated issues raised by the classic beating fantasy in which the young girl must choose to accept the role of victim, aggressor, or spectator. In her conclusion, she con- siders modes of resistance to this triangular drama and to the related fantasy of romance.
In the Name of Love will be essential reading for scholars and students in the fields of gender studies, critical, psycho-analytic, and novel theory, as well as Victorian and contemporary fiction.
MICHELLE A. MASSÉ is Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. A graduate of Anna Maria College, she received her Ph.D. degree from Brown University.
Cover illustration: King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, by Edward Burne-Jones. Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, New York.
Good copy, light spine tanning/creasing, crease to front cover corner, light wear.
2000, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 23 x 15.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Reaktion books / London
$45.00 - In stock -
This ground-breaking reading of Goya's late work concentrates on the end of a century as a neglected milestone in the artist's career. Goya waited until 1799 to publish his celebrated series of drawings known as the Caprichos: difficult, often violent, deeply disturbing compositions which offer a personal vision of the 'world turned upside down'. Taking their cues from sources as diverse as Mikhail Bakhtin and the Marquis de Sade, the authors show how obsessions with the notions of 'revolution' and 'Carnival', both inversions of the established order, characterized Spanish culture at the end of the eighteenth century. By relating these ideas to the fantasies and fixations Goya explored in the secret laboratory of his Caprichos, Victor I. Stoichita and Anna Maria Coderch suggest fascinating connections between the artist's world and our own at the end of the millennium.
Heavily illustrated throughout.
Victor L. Stoichita is Professor of the History of Art at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Anna Maria Coderch is an art historian.
VG copy.
1992, English
Softcover, 386 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Princeton University Press / New York
$25.00 - Out of stock
1992 Princeton edition.
Among the most influential books on tragedy written in the past half-century, Walter Kaufmann's Tragedy and Philosophy develops a bold poetics based on the author's critical reexamination of the views of Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Not only does this book reveal ancient Greek tragedy as surprisingly modern and experimental, but it also recasts such concepts as mimesis and catharsis, "pity and fear," hubris, the tragic collision, and the "death of tragedy."
"Walter Kaufmann . . . is a philosopher with a penchant for the kind of fresh thinking that philosophers rarely do. Here he has attempted a searching analysis of the essence of tragedy. He offers a new definition and, without raising his voice, his version of poetics as against that of Aristotle." —The New York Times
"The book as a whole is a tribute to the author's impressive scholarly and critical virtuosity." —Classical Philology
Walter Kaufmann (1921-1980) was Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. This book is the third in a trilogy that includes his Critique of Religion and Philosophy and From Shakespeare to Existentialism. Kaufmann is also the author of Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist.
Very Good copy with corner crease to back cover corner top.
1997, English
Softcover, 244 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Cambridge University Press / Cambridge
$15.00 - In stock -
How do gender and race become objects of intellectual inquiry? What happens to marginal discourses when they participate in the academic processes of scrutiny and evaluation? In Women Intellectuals, Modernism, and Difference, Alice Gambrell examines the careers of a group of women intellectuals - Leonora Carrington, Ella Deloria, H. D., Zora Neale Hurston, and Frida Kahlo - whose scholarly rediscovery coincided with the rise of feminist and minority discourse studies in the academy. She examines the exhibitions, memoirs, poems, ethnographies, and personal correspondences these women produced, combining concrete local observation with contemporary theoretical perspectives on race and gender. Through a mixture of empirical detail and theoretical speculation, Gambrell explores the role these women played in expanding the conception of American literature by their involvement in the Harlem Renaissance. She offers new ways of thinking about the relationships between cultural studies, feminism and minority discourse within the ongoing reassessment of modernism.
Good copy, crease to front top corner, light wear.
2004, English
Softcover, 480 pages, 23.4 x 15.5 cm
Published by
Duke University Press / North Carolina
$62.00 - Out of stock
Published in English for the first time, Didier Eribon' s well-received and celebrated work on a philosophy of and examination of gay life.
A bestseller in France following its publication in 1999, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self is an extraordinary set of reflections on "the gay question" by Didier Eribon, one of France's foremost public intellectuals. Known internationally as the author of a path-breaking biography of Michel Foucault, Eribon is a leading voice in French gay studies. In explorations of gay subjectivity as it is lived now and as it has been expressed in literary history and in the life and work of Foucault, Eribon argues that gay male politics, social life, and culture are transformative responses to an oppressive social order. Bringing together the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, and Erving Goffman, he contends that gay culture and political movements flow from the need to overcome a world of insult in the process of creating gay selves. Eribon describes the emergence of homosexual literature in Britain and France at the turn of the last century and traces this new gay discourse from Oscar Wilde and the literary circles of late-Victorian Oxford to Andre Gide and Marcel Proust.
He asserts that Foucault should be placed in a long line of authors—including Wilde, Gide, and Proust—who from the nineteenth century onward have tried to create spaces in which to resist subjection and reformulate oneself.
Drawing on his unrivaled knowledge of Foucault's oeuvre, Eribon presents a masterful new interpretation of Foucault. He calls attention to a particular passage from Madness and Civilization that has never been translated into English. Written some fifteen years before The History of Sexuality, this passage seems to contradict Foucault's famous idea that homosexuality was a late-nineteenth-century construction. Including an argument for the use of Hannah Arendt's thought in gay rights advocacy, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self is an impassioned call for critical, active engagement with the question of how gay life is shaped both from without and within.
Didier Eribon is a philosopher, historian, and journalist in France, where he writes frequently for the weekly news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur. In addition to his biography Michel Foucault, he is the author of books including Une morale du minoritaire: Variations sur un thème de Jean Genet and Hérésies: Essais sur la théorie de la sexualité.
Michael Lucey is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality (published by Duke University Press) and Gide’s Bent: Sexuality, Politics, Writing.
2001, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 194 pages, 23.5 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Cambridge University Press / Cambridge
$70.00 - In stock -
First 2001 hardcover edition.
This original and provocative 2001 study discusses the work of a number of authors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to argue that mainstream society was enabled to accept the non-normative sexuality of the Aesthetic Movement chiefly through parody and self-parody. Highlighting Victorian popular culture, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody adds an important dimension to the theorisations of parody as a combative strategy by which sexually marginalized groups undermine the status quo. From W. S. Gilbert's drama and Vernon Lee and Christopher Isherwood's prose to George du Maurier's cartoons and Max Beerbohm's caricatures, Dennis Denisoff explores the parodies' interactions with the personae and texts of canonical authors such as Alfred Tennyson, Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne, and Oscar Wilde. In doing so, he considers the impact that these interactions had on modern ideas of gender, sexuality, taste and politics.
Dennis Denisoff is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Ryerson University, Ontario. He is the author of Erin Mouré: Her Life and Works, the editor of Queeries: An Anthology of Gay Male Prose, and the co-editor of Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence.
VG copy in VG dust jacket.
1993, English
Softcover, 346 pages 21.5 x 13.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Northwestern University Press / Evanston
$50.00 - In stock -
In her seminal study, first published in 1981, Marjorie Perloff argues that the map of Modernist poetry needs to be redrawn to include a central tradition which cannot properly be situated within the Romantic-Symbolist tradition dominating the early twentieth century. She traces this tradition from its early "French connection" in the poetry of Rimbaud and Apollinaire as well as in Cubist, Dada, and early Surrealist painting; through its various manifestations in the work of Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound; to such postmodern "landscapes without depth" as the French/English language constructions of Samuel Beckett, the elusive dreamscapes of John Ashbery, and the performance works of David Antin and John Cage.
Very Good copy of 1993 second edition.