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.
2000, English
Softcover, 554 pages, 24.2 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Station Hill Press / Barrytown
$58.00 - Out of stock
This new reader from Station Hill (Blanchot's longtime publisher in the United States) is six books in one, and the first and only collection of Maurice Blanchot's celebrated fiction and critical/philosophical writing.
Regarded both on the European continent and in America as one of the truly great authors of French Post-Modernism, Blanchot's reputation and readership in English has already established him as a modern classic.
THE BLANCHOT READER brings together a substantial collection of critical and philosophical writings (The Gaze of Orpheus) and the only edition in print in English of his major works of fiction (Thomas the Obscure, Death Sentence, Vicious Circles, The Madness of the Day, When the Time Comes and The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me). General readers and students alike will seek out these essential works by the writer Susan Sontag referred to as "an unimpeachably major voice in modern French literature."
Maurice Blanchot is now recognized as a major twentieth century philosopher whose influence extends to the works of Derrida, Foucault, Levinas, Lacan and others. Blanchot's philosophical works explore issues concerning the problematic acts of speech and writing, death and questions of political right--concerns that also shape his fiction. Blanchot's fiction draws the reader in by upsetting expectations, we are confronted by characters who are in situations they don't completely understand. The settings are mysterious, almost surreal. As we read further into the story, hoping for greater clarity - why is this character here? Where did he come from?, etc. - meaning and resolution are constantly deferred. The lack of closure in Blanchot's fiction gives it at an odd kind of suspense and his spare but poetic language contributes to creating a very distinct atmosphere. Within and outside of these philosophical struggles there is the German occupation of France, and Auschwitz. The presence of an arbitrary or absurdist power and the spectre of death hover. Blanchot never concludes his exploration of the these issues, they remain indeterminate, but writing continues, despite its seeming impossibility.
"Maurice Blanchot's work is an invitation to the reader to join him on those severe and icy slopes of consciousness, to experience what it means to be both fully dead - utterly separated from the world, "a shadow on the sun" - and fully alive. It is an amazing, exhilarating, appalling experience. Station Hill Press should be congratulated for its courage in bringing forth this important but obviously not very commercial enterprise. Blanchot's work is, as he says, "a force for transformation and creation, made to create enigmas rather than to elucidate them." For the first time, we are able to see it with some clarity."—Seminary Co-op Bookstore
1992, English
Softcover, 460 pages, 23.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very 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).
1972, Japanese
Softcover, 250 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Misaki Shobo / Tokyo
$70.00 - In stock -
Erotica April 1972, Japan's erotic magazine for bibliophiles, published in the 1960s—1970s by Misaki Bookstore. Each issue densely packed with illustrations, articles, news, and feature stories around the universe of Eros from around the world during a time of great sexual revolution. Covering all manner of sexual customs and subject matter from the arts and literature, film and manga, philosophy and radical politics, Erotica was Japan's leading erotic academic journal, featuring, amongst it's heavy historical and contemporary papers, the cutting-edge of Japanese and international erotic artists, from Hans Bellmer to Toshio Saeki.
Erotica April 1972 features the artwork of Toshio Saeki, Kyozo Hayashi, Koaku Yukio, Kaname Ozuma, "Alone" by Japanese photographer Takumi Uchida, Meiji sexual history, erotica by poet and painter Mitsuharu Kaneko, European erotic cinema, and much more.
Very Good copy, light wear.
1970, Japanese
Softcover, 250 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Misaki Shobo / Tokyo
$70.00 - In stock -
Erotica July 1970, Japan's erotic magazine for bibliophiles, published in the 1960s—1970s by Misaki Bookstore. Each issue densely packed with illustrations, articles, news, and feature stories around the universe of Eros from around the world during a time of great sexual revolution. Covering all manner of sexual customs and subject matter from the arts and literature, film and manga, philosophy and radical politics, Erotica was Japan's leading erotic academic journal, featuring, amongst it's heavy historical and contemporary papers, the cutting-edge of Japanese and international erotic artists, from Hans Bellmer to Toshio Saeki.
Erotica July 1970 features the artwork of Toshio Saeki, Haruo Shinozaki, Masayuki Kitamura, Tomoe Shibaoka, "Pornology" by Japanese photographer Toyohiko Yasui, Swedish erotica, European erotic cinema, Pleasure Machines/Mechanical Sex featuring artworks by Tomi Ungerer and science fiction with illustrations by Yasutaka Tsutsui, the psychology of premajure ejaculation, and much more.
Very Good copy, light wear.
1970, Japanese
Softcover, 250 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Misaki Shobo / Tokyo
$50.00 - In stock -
Erotica February 1970, Japan's erotic magazine for bibliophiles, published in the 1960s—1970s by Misaki Bookstore. Each issue densely packed with illustrations, articles, news, and feature stories around the universe of Eros from around the world during a time of great sexual revolution. Covering all manner of sexual customs and subject matter from the arts and literature, film and manga, philosophy and radical politics, Erotica was Japan's leading erotic academic journal, featuring, amongst it's heavy historical and contemporary papers, the cutting-edge of Japanese and international erotic artists, from Hans Bellmer to Toshio Saeki.
Erotica February 1970 features the artwork of Hans Bellmer, Aoi Fujimoto, George Grosz, and Haruo Shinozaki, amongst many others, a "blue film encyclopedia", European erotic film, the Temptation of Saint Anthony in the visual arts, and much more.
Very Good copy, light wear.
1971, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), 156 pages, 21.5 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Lemon Inc. / Tokyo
$45.00 - In stock -
April 1971 issue of legendary Japanese underground arts periodical, Black Magazine (or Black Notebook), a taboo-shattering vehicle of the 1970s subculture in Tokyo. A magazine like no-other, each issue, "a paradise of 1970's heretical culture", was a who's who of non-conformity, introducing a new wave of illustrators, painters, doll-makers and photographers, "taboo" sexuality and fetish culture, avant-garde comics, sadistic literature, radical criticism, queer poetry, activism, black humour, underground film and theatre, and all manner of transgressive, esoteric and erotic material, new and historical. Black Magazine featured the work of Yukio Mishima, Toshio Saeki, Izumi Suzuki, Simon Yotsuya, Shūji Terayama, Ken Katayama, Nobuyoshi Araki, Genpei Akasegawa, Keiichi Tanaami, Kikuji Yamashita, Aoi Fujimoto, Tadanori Yokoo, Hiroshi Nakamura, and so many others. It was also where Japanese photographer Satomi Nihongi's Tokyo Transgender photographs were first printed. Black Magazine was heavy with queer and trans content, and Nihongi's "The Most Beautifuls" was a regular photo-feature in its pages. A lot of great things started in the pages of this unique magazine. A highly recommended publication!
1973, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 158 pages, 21.5 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
$180.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 1973 hardcover edition of Bloom's classic, The Anxiety of Influence, a book that cast its own long shadow of influence since it was first published in 1973. Through an insightful study of Romantic poets, Bloom puts forth his central vision of the relations between tradition and the individual artist. Although Bloom was never the leader of any critical ""camp,"" his argument that all literary texts are a response to those that precede them had an enormous impact on the practice of deconstruction and poststructuralist literary theory in this country. The book remains a central work of criticism for all students of literature and has sold over 17,000 copies in paperback since 1984. Written in a moving personal style, anchored by concrete examples, and memorably quotable, Bloom's book maintains that the anxiety of influence cannot be evaded—neither by poets nor by responsible readers and critics.
VG copy in G price-clipped dust jacket with some wear to spine tips/extremities and light rubbing.
1997, English
Softcover, 332 pages, 23.5 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Alfred Knopf / New York
$35.00 - In stock -
In this provocative, pioneering, and wholly engrossing cultural history, noted scholar Marilyn Yalom explores twenty-five thousand years of ideas, images, and perceptions of the female breast—in religion, psychology, politics, society, and the arts.
Through the centuries, the breast has been laden with hugely powerful and contradictory meanings. There is the "good breast" of reverence and life, the breast that nourishes infants and entire communities, as depicted in ancient idols, fifteenth-century Italian Madonnas, and representations of equality in the French Revolution. Then there is the "bad breast" of Ezekiel's wanton harlots, Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, and the torpedo-breasted dominatrix, symbolizing enticement and aggression. Yalom examines these contradictions--and illuminates the implications behind them.
A fascinating, astute, and richly allusive journey from Paleolithic goddesses to modern day feminists, A History of the Breast is full of insight and surprises. As Yalom says, "I intend to make you think about women's breasts as you never have before." In this, she succeeds brilliantly.
Marilyn Yalom, born Marilyn Koenick, was an American feminist author and historian. She was a senior scholar at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, and a professor of French. She served as the institute's director from 1984 to 1985.
VG copy. First edition.
1986, English
Softcover, 242 pages, 21.5 x14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Methuen Publishing / London
$18.00 - In stock -
In Brecht in Context John Willett, author of The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht and joint editor of the definitive edition of Brecht's work in English, goes far beyond Brecht's theatre practice and looks at him as an all-round writer and man of his time. Through chapters on Brecht's relationships and attitudes to contemporary politics, English and American literature, Expressionism, music, art and cinema, as well as to such figures as Auden, Kipling and Piscator, the book presents a detailed and wide-ranging account of one of the most significant men of this century. A final section prints some of Willett's own previously unpublished eye-witness accounts of various Brechtian performances, meetings and conversations from 1946 to the present day.
'Economical, witty and unpretentious in a way that Brecht would have liked, but immensely well-informed and thoroughly documented'—LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS
Good copy with fading to spine, previous owner's name to title page, some sticker damage to bc.
1987, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 205 pages, 22.5 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
St. Martin's Press / New York
$50.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition.
Dedicated to Samuel Beckett in honor of his eightieth birthday, the present book provides a focus on Beckett's later fiction and drama-his fiction since How It Is (1961) and his drama since Endgame (1957). Published here for the first time, the thirteen essays are characterized by originality of material and freshness of view-point. They will be especially helpful to the reader who is drawn to the recent work of one of the twentieth century's most important authors, but who feels the need of some help in coming to terms with it.
As testimony to Beckett's international reputation, the contributors are drawn from various parts of the English-speaking world, and include many of the leading Beckett scholars of the day.
VG—VG.
1990 , English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 212 pages, 22.5 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
St. Martin's Press / New York
$25.00 - In stock -
First 1996 hardcover edition of selection of some of the "most significant critical work written on André Gide during his lifetime and since. As a major writer of the twentieth-century, his life and creative output, as well as his role as a leading intellectual, attracted comment from prominent contemporaries and continues to have relevance today. Containing a substantial introduction and overview, this compilation offers a variety of illuminating perspectives that will inform and guide the general and specialist reader."
André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French writer and author whose writing spanned a wide variety of styles and topics. He was awarded the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature. Gide's career ranged from his beginnings in the symbolist movement to criticising imperialism between the two World Wars.
André Paul Guillaume Gide (French: [ɑ̃dʁe pɔl ɡijom ʒid]; 22 November 1869 – 19 February 1951) was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947 "for his comprehensive and artistically significant writings, in which human problems and conditions have been presented with a fearless love of truth and keen psychological insight".[1] Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.
Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide exposes to public view the conflict and eventual reconciliation of the two sides of his personality, split apart by a straitlaced traducing of education and a narrow social moralism. Gide's work can be seen as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritanical constraints, and centres on his continuous effort to achieve intellectual honesty. His self-exploratory texts reflect his search of how to be fully oneself, even to the point of owning one's sexual nature, without at the same time betraying one's values. His political activity is informed by the same ethos, as indicated by his repudiation of communism after his 1936 voyage to the USSR.
VG—VG.
1998, English
Softcover, 352 pages, 25 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$35.00 - In stock -
This investigation of power and the body is a brilliantly original account of the nature of force as it functions in religious rituals, sorcery, political relations, and other social domains. Laying the foundation for an "anthropology of forces", it is crucial reading for anyone interested in how bodies and power circulate in a range of human contexts and cultures.
For Jose Gil the body, with its capacity to translate forces into signs, is the source of power. Analyzing the language of mime and gestures, comparing magical cures to psychiatric ones, contrasting the flayed body of Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" with the anatomical body in Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica, he develops a typology of metamorphoses of the body as they correspond to systems of signs.
A major intervention that marks the first appearance of Gil's work in English, Metamorphoses of the Body gives us an entirely new way of looking at relationships between bodies, forces, politics, and people.
"Steeped in the classic issues of political anthropology through close readings of the sources that have defined them, Gil provides an impressive synthesis of theories of power in the transition from tribal to modern societies. After all the recent baroque theoretical attention focused on the body, Gil reminds us how embedded this concern has been in ideologies of kingship and the emergence of the state."—George E. Marcus, Rice University
"In its heady mix of ethnography and philosophy, Gil's intriguing and highly unusual book makes you wonder why theorizing the meaning of the institutions of so-called primitive societies has virtually disappeared-and what such a terrible deficit implies for critical inquiry as a whole. Postmodernizing the legacy of a great lineage, including Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, Sahlins, Clastres, Deleuze and Guattari, Gil makes you realize all over again why primitive society is here to stay."—Michael Taussig, Columbia University
"Metamorphoses of the Body is a brilliant and original analysis of the political and ideological status of the body as it relates to the empowerment and the constitution of the modern state. For Gil, if one is vigilant, one realizes that at the very heart of the problem of the nature of power, one is always confronted with the primeval power of the human body, with its intrinsic, indomitable energy."—Réda Bensmaia, Brown University
José Gil (b. 1939 Muecate, Portuguese Mozambique) is a Portuguese philosopher.
Very Good - Near Fine copy.
1988, English
Softcover, 180 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Columbia University Press / New York
$20.00 - Out of stock
From one of our most outspoken feminist critics, this collection explores various ways in which the body can be rethought of as a site of knowledge rather than as a medium to move beyond or dominate. Moving between a theoretical and confessional stance, Gallop explores Sade's relation to mothers both in his novels and his life; Barthe's The Pleasure of the Text; Freud's work, read not as a psychological text but as a literary endeavor and from a woman's point of view; and Luce Irigarary's famous This Sex Which Is Not One.
Average copy with price clipping to title page, general wear to corners, foxing to block edges.
2006, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 27.1 x 21.4 cm
Published by
Hayward Gallery Publishing / London
$75.00 - In stock -
An exploration of the unsettling collisions of art and culture in Georges Bataille's revolutionary journal and a new consideration of twentieth-century masterpieces by Picasso, Miro, Dali, and others against the canvas of their renegade times.
In the Paris art world of the 1920s, Georges Bataille and his journal DOCUMENTS represented a dissident branch of surrealism. Bataille—poet, philosopher, writer, and self-styled "enemy within" surrealism—used DOCUMENTS to put art into violent confrontation with popular culture, ethnography, film, and archaeology. Undercover Surrealism, taking the visual richness of DOCUMENTS as its starting point, recovers the explosive and vital intellectual context of works by Picasso, Miro, Dali, Giacometti, and others in 1920s Paris.
Profusely illustrated (featuring 180 colour images) and filled with valuable English translations of original French texts from DOCUMENTS accompanied by essays and shorter descriptive texts, Undercover Surrealism recreates and recontextualizes Bataille's still unsettling approach to culture. Putting Picasso's Three Dancers back into its original context of sex, sacrifice, and violence, for example, then juxtaposing it with images of gang wars, tribal masks, voodoo ritual, Hollywood musicals, and jazz, makes the urgency and excitement of Bataille's radical ideas startlingly vivid to a twenty-first-century reader.
1988, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 28 pages, 30 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
$15.00 - In stock -
Rare copy of Arterial magazine, published for a moment in the late 1980's out of the Monash University Union Building in Clayton, edited by Stephen O'Connell, Giacomina Pradolin, Eleni Prodromidis, Roger Leong, Robert L. Schubert... This issue featuring an interview with author Kathy Acker, Peter Greenaway, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, and more.
"Arterial's concern in this issue is no longer with a chaste field of investigation whose broad rubric is both 'visual and 'art. The term is emasculated as the visual transgresses into the literary, the psychoanalytic, the anthropological. Unfurling in this way, a polymorphous collection of works undermines its coherence. Greenaway, Acker, Lacan are all on Separate Tables, eating the same menu perhaps - language. Thinking of de Mann, ours is a rhetorical strategy. The type which pushes the question of language to the fore, demanding that 'art' be re-thought in terms of language, "and in this movement art and language are transformed together, neither remains what it was.""—from the introduction
Good copy with some cover wear.
1982/1992, Japanese
Softcover, 192 pages, 21 x 14.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atelier Peyotl / Tokyo
$60.00 - In stock -
"Corpse" Special Feature Issue of cult Japanese underground magazine Yaso, first published in 1982, then re-printed in 1992, edited by Yuichi Konno and Atelier Peyotl (publishers of Night Vision/Yaso/Peyotl/Wave/Silvester Club...). Heavily illustrated with texts in Japanese that look at the theme of death and the dead in the arts, literature, occultism, ancient sciences, philosophy, mythology, poetry, film, crime, and much more. Features John Duncan, Tetsumi Kudo, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Masahisa Fukase, Franz Kafka, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Guillaume Apollinaire, Joe Potts (LAFMS), Takashi Ishii, Rudolf II — Holy Roman Emperor, Akinari Ueda, Marcel Duchamp, Chris Burden, Paul Celan, Alain Resnais, Gilyak Amagasaki, Shusaku Arakawa, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Shuji Terayama, Andy Warhol, Charles Manson, Brian Wilson, Kyoko Endoh, Princess Yongtai, Salvador Dalí, Ono no Komachi, Kiyoshi Kasai, Caravaggio, Throbbing Gristle, Takizawa Bakin, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, Manson Family, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Wu Zetian, Genesis P-Orridge, Yusuke Nakahara, Ranpo Lagrange, Mitsusada Fukasaku, Nakai Hideo, Richard Wagner, and many more.
Very Good copy.
1994, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 23 x 21.6 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$45.00 - Out of stock
First English printing from the legendary Atlas Press, London.
"DADA MEANS NOTHING!" So proclaimed Tristan Tzara, the movement's tireless publicist. Yet this did not prevent the most fanatical and talented artists and writers across Europe from rushing to join its ranks. Anti-war, anti-art, anti-dada, from its beginnings in Zurich during the first World War the dadas swept aside the cultural, philosophical and political norms of their time. Utter disgust with a society that had created the war (and then expected to survive the peace) spurred them to ever greater demonstrations of revulsion and derision. Yet it was not all nihilism: many factions worked within the Dada Movement and it was Huelsenbeck's intention to embody most of them in the Dada Almanac. The largest collection of Dadaist texts ever assembled by the movement, it was originally published in 1920 in a mixture of French and German.
The Dada Almanac was truly international in scope, with substantial sections from the Swiss and French sections of the movement, it embodies Dada's failings as well as its successes, its excesses, its seriousness, its idiocy, but above all the anarchic vitality which made it such a vital precondition for so much that followed in the fields of art, literature and general cultural terrorism.
The editors of this first English translation have added dozens of other relevant texts, documents, portraits etc, as well as explaining contemporary references and events and providing biographies of the numerous personalities involved.
Very Good copy, light wear.
1974, English
Softcover, 432 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Princeton University Press / New York
$45.00 - In stock -
First 1974 edition.
For more than thirty years, Fredric Jameson has been one of the most productive, wide-ranging, and distinctive literary theorists in the United States and the Anglophone world. Marxism and Form provided a pioneering account of the work of the major European Marxist theorists—T. W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, and Jean-Paul Sartre—work that was, at the time, largely neglected in the English-speaking world. Through penetrating readings of each theorist, Jameson developed a critical mode of engagement that has had tremendous in.uence. He provided a framework for analyzing the connection between art and the historical circumstances of its making—in particular, how cultural artifacts distort, repress, or transform their circumstances through the abstractions of aesthetic form.
Jameson’s presentation of the critical thought of this Hegelian Marxism provided a stark alternative to the Anglo-American tradition of empiricism and humanism. It would later provide a compelling alternative to poststructuralism and deconstruction as they became dominant methodologies in aesthetic criticism.
One year after Marxism and Form, Princeton published Jameson’s The Prison-House of Language (1972), which provided a thorough historical and philosophical description of formalism and structuralism. Both books remain central to Jameson’s main intellectual legacy: describing and extending a tradition of Western Marxism in cultural theory and literary interpretation.
Average—Good copy. Some light creasing to covers, softening to extremities, erasable light lead pencil notation. Spine uncreased, binding preserved.
1983 / 1986, English
Softcover, 244 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$15.00 - Out of stock
“This concise and lucid volume offers a satisfying survey of all the major theories, from structuralism in the 1960s to deconstruction today, that have made academic criticism both intriguing and off-putting to the outsider.” —New York Times Book Review
“Literary Theory has the kind of racy readability that one associates more often with English critics who have set their faces resolutely against theory. It’s not just a brilliant polemical essay; it’s also a remarkable feat of condensation, explication, and synthesis.” —Sunday Times (London)
“A concise guide to the most interesting and mystifying trends in the study of literature over the last fifty years.” —The Nation
This classic work covers all of the major movements in literary studies in this century. Noted for its clear, engaging style and unpretentious treatment, Literary Theory has become the introduction of choice for anyone interested in learning about the world of contemporary literary thought.
On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Literary Theory’s debut, Terry Eagleton reflects on the state of theory in academia today, the growth of antitheory (itself an interesting theoretical subject), its common-if problematic-place among survey coursework, and theory’s continued relevance to scholarly pursuits. In this contemporary, retrospective moment, as scholars critically analyze the incredibly broad impact of the theoretical movement, Literary Theory remains an essential initiation to the intellectually stimulating world of theoretical analysis.
Terry Eagleton is John Edward Taylor professor of English literature at the University of Manchester. His numerous books include The Meaning of Life, How to Read a Poem, and After Theory.
VG copy (spine slightly cocked). First 1983 ed. 1986 printing.
1997, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 224 pages, 21.6 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Princeton University Press / New York
$35.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Gennady Barabtarlo
Commentaries by Gennady Barabtarlo
Nabokov's dream diary—published for the first time.
On October 14, 1964, Vladimir Nabokov, a lifelong insomniac, began a curious experiment. Over the next eighty days, immediately upon waking, he wrote down his dreams, following the instructions in An Experiment with Time by British philosopher John Dunne. The purpose was to test the theory that time may go in reverse, so that a later event may generate an earlier dream. The result—published here for the first time—is a fascinating diary in which Nabokov recorded sixty-four dreams (and subsequent daytime episodes) on 118 index cards, providing a rare glimpse of the artist at his most private. Insomniac Dreams presents the text of Nabokov’s dream experiment, illustrated with a selection of his original index cards, and provides rich annotations and analysis that put them in the context of his life and writings.
Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1899. After studying French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, he launched his literary career in Berlin and Paris, writing innovative fiction, verse, and drama in his native Russian. In 1940 he moved to America, where he wrote some of his greatest works, including Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962). He died in Switzerland in 1977. Gennady Barabtarlo (19492019) was professor of literature at the University of Missouri and the author of a number of books on Nabokov. Barabtarlo also translated into Russian three of Nabokov's novels and all of his English-language short stories.
Fine copy in NF dust jacket. First 1997 hardcover edition.
1994, English
Softcover, 404 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
John Hopkins University Press / Baltimore
$20.00 - Out of stock
Featuring "Shibboleth for Paul Celan" by Jacques Derrida
The crucial role of Paul Celan in postwar literature is widely recognized among European scholars, but has been addressed only scarcely in the Anglo-American academy. In Word Traces Aris Fioretos attempts to redress that imbalance, bringing together thirteen expert readers in the most extensive English-language critical collection on Celan yet published.
The volume begins with the first complete English translation of Jacques Derrida's book-length essay, "Shibboleth for Paul Celan." Chapters by Otto Pöggeler, Dennis J. Schmidt, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe then explore the relationship of poetry and philosophy in Celan's work.
Christopher Fynsk, Joel Golb, and Werner Hamacher discuss the interrelation of poetry and poetics, and Anders Olsson, Hans-Jost Frey, and volume editor Fioretos examine the peculiarly "written" character of Celan's poetry. In the book's final section, chapters by Hans-Jost Frey, Thomas Pepper, and Leonard Olschner treat the implications of Celan's practice of translation.
"Despite a growing interest in Celan over the past twenty years, there is no collection in English which comes close to the extended critical presentation assembled here. Word Traces will be a standard text on Celan—the variety of the essays is wide and will appeal to specialists in philosophy, German studies, modern poetry, comparative literature, and literary theory. This is an impressive collection of texts written by philosophers and critics whose concerns show the pertinence and breadth of Celan's writings for contemporary thought."—Steven Ungar, University of lowa
Aris Fioretos is a Mellon Scholar in the Department of German at the Johns Hopkins University. He is author of Det kritiska ögonblicket: Hölderlin, Benjamin, Celan, editor of a forthcoming volume of essays, The Solid Letter: New Readings of Hölderlin, and translator of the Swedish edition of Jacques Derrida's Schibboleth pour Paul Celan.
Very Good copy.
1997, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 23 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Routledge / London
$60.00 - In stock -
Rare first edition of Critchley's Very Little ... Almost Nothing, published in 1997. This remarkable book puts the question of the meaning of life back at the centre of intellectual debate. Its central concern is how we can find a meaning to human finitude without recourse to anything that transcends that finitude. A profound but secular meditation on the theme of death, Critchley traces the idea of nihilism through Blanchot, Levinas, Jena Romanticism and Cavell, culminating in a reading of Beckett, in many ways the hero of the book.
"This is a very brave book ...it makes philosophical conversation possible again after two decades of pragmatist intolerance."—Roger Poole, Parallax
"This is an often beautifully written philosophical act of mourning ... It also commands respect because it obliges one to examine the fictions one employs to avoid really doing philosophy. Critchley's steadfastly post-Kantian rejection of theological answers to the questions he asks is very welcome."—Andrew Bowie, Radical Philosophy
"Very Little ... Almost Nothing manages with some aplomb, to pull off the extraordinarily difficult task of saying something new and interesting about Beckett and Blanchot."—Martin McQuillan, New Formations
Very Good copy with some wear to extremities.
1997, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 412 pages, 24 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Stanford University Press / Palo Alto
$60.00 - In stock -
In groundbreaking readings linking works of Descartes, Shakespeare, and Cervantes with contemporary revisions of Freud and Nietzsche, Unspeakable Subjects argues that the concepts and discourses that have come to define European modernity―the subject's extension and responsibility, genealogies of intention and of freedom, the literary, legal, and medical construction of the body, among others―arise as strategies for evading a profound redefinition of the nature of events in early modern Europe.
Negotiating the often competing claims of rhetorical reading and cultural analysis, Lezra reassesses the grounds of literary and philosophical history as a materialist practice of eventful reading. His original accounts of Don Quixote, Descartes's Second Meditation and Regulae, and Measure for Measure tack between linguistic, psychoanalytic, and cultural materialist approaches to define and discuss the double aspect of the event in early modern literature and philosophy, and in Freudian and Heideggerian critical discourse: the event is at once an accident, the unpredictable, deontic intrusion of the empirical in idealizing schemes, and the disclosing and recollecting of a subject's relation to discursive and cultural morphologies in which empirical events are said properly to take place.
The advent of "modernity," Unspeakable Subjects argues, arises as the novel account of the permanently interrupted negotiation between the event's deontic and its morphological aspects. If Unspeakable Subjects considers on this level the "singularities" of textual events, it also seeks to show their complex relation to the "singularities" of the forms given material history.
Drawing upon such varied sources as the proclamations of James I, the law of entail, Renaissance treatises on typography, and documents on Jacobean and Elizabethan privateering, as well as accounts of the "events" of May 1968 and of Lacan's treatment of the fort-da game, and of the cultural uses of the figure of Don Quixote in Spanish proto-Falangist thought, the author shows that the institutional setting and conditions for literary and philosophical speech-acts, and the graphic constraints upon the bodies that such acts support, also take shape according to patterns set in response to the instability of the event.
NF—Fine copy in NF dust jacket under mylar wrap.
1984, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 364 pages, 24 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Leicester University Press / Leicester
$45.00 - Out of stock
First 1984 hardcover edition.
This comprehensive study of Jarry's work examines in detail all of his writings from the early schoolboy farces and the Ubu plays, through his poetry, novels, critical writings and journalism, to the musical comedies of his later years. Jarry emerges as a figure of considerable importance on the European cultural scene, not just as playwright and poet, but also as novelist, critic and pataphysician with insights into the nature of literature and language which make him a forerunner of much of the literature and critical theory of recent years. English translations of the extensive quotes from Jarry's writings are provided alongside the French text throughout.
Keith Beaumont was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1944, and educated there, graduating from the University of Melbourne in 1966 in French with German. He was awarded the degree of Ph.D. by the University of Warwick in 1971 for a thesis on Nihilism in French Literature, 1880-1900. Since 1970 he has been Lecturer in French at the University of Leicester.
Dr. Beaumont's interest in Jarry dates from his undergraduate days. He has written a number of articles on Jarry and on pataphysics. He is a member of the Collège de Pataphysique and the Société des Amis d'Alfred Jarry.
VG in VG dust jacket.