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, 240 pages, 23 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Polity / US
$55.00 - In stock -
First 2000 Polity Press edition.
In this new book, Bauman examines how we have moved away from a 'heavy' and 'solid', hardware-focused modernity to a 'light' and 'liquid', software-based modernity. This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition. The new remoteness and un-reachability of global systemic structure coupled with the unstructured and under-defined, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics and human togetherness, call for the rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frames used to narrate human individual experience and their joint history.This book is dedicated to this task. Bauman selects five of the basic concepts which have served to make sense of shared human life - emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community - and traces their successive incarnations and changes of meaning.Liquid Modernity concludes the analysis undertaken in Bauman's two previous books The Human Consequences and In Search of Politics. Together these volumes form a brilliant analysis of the changing conditions of social and political life by one of the most original thinkers writing today.
VG—NF copy.
1990, English
Softcover, 126 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$15.00 - In stock -
First 1990 edition.
In Modernism and Hegemony, first published in 1990, Neil Larsen exposes the underlying political narratives of modernist aesthetic theory and practice. Unlike earlier Marxist critics, Larsen insists that modernist ideology be approached as a "displaced politics" and not simply as an aesthetic phenomenon. In this view, modernism is broadly ideological project comprising not only the literary-artist canon but also a wide array of theoretical discourses from aesthetics to philosophy, culture, and politics. Larsen gives postmodernism some credit for the apparent breakup of modernism, and for exposing the philosophical and political nature of its aesthetic stance. But he parts company with its ideological and epistemological notions, proposing to change the terms, and thus the framework, of the debate.For Larsen, modernism is intimately linked to a crisis of representation that affected all aspects of life in the late nineteenth century - a period when capitalism itself was undergoing transformation from its "classical" free market phase into a more abstract, monopolistic and imperialistic stage. Larsen finds the resultant loosening of ties between individuals and society - the breakdown of social and historical agency - behind the growth of modernism. He employs speculative cross-readings of key texts by Marx and Adorno, an examination of Manet's "The Execution of Maximilian," and an analysis of modernism in a Third World setting to explain why modernism made special claims upon the aesthetic, and how it ultimately ascribed historical agency to "works of art."
VG copy.
1995, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 22.5 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Northwestern University Press / Evanston
$10.00 - In stock -
The Russian critic M. M. Bakhtin has recently become a major figure in contemporary theory beyond his traditional influence in Slavic literary studies. Bakhtin in Contexts explores the revolutionary impact Bakhtin's ideas have carried in contemporary discussions of language, art, culture, and social science in recent years. The contributors represent a broad range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, epitomizing the views of Russian and American specialists in those fields Bakhtin often referred to as "the human sciences." The diversity of perspective and flexibility of approach make this a unique contribution to Bakhtin studies and to the ongoing dialogue between Western and Russian theorists.
The contributors include: Stanley Aronowitz, R. Bracht Branham, Vincent Crapanzano, John Dore, Lisa Eckstrom, Caryl Emerson, Amy Mandelker, Gary Saul Morson, Dale E. Peterson
Amy Mandelker is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York, and the author of Framing "Anna Karenina": Tolstoy, the Woman Question, and the Victorian Novel.
Fine copy.
1995, English
Softcover, 274 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Duke University Press / North Carolina
$25.00 - In stock -
IMAGINE FREDRIC JAMESON—the world's foremost Marxist critic-kidnapped and taken on a joyride through the cultural ephemera, generational hype, and Cold War fallout of our post-post-contemporary landscape. In The Jamesonian Unconscious, a book as joyful as it is critical and insightful, Clint Burnham devises unexpected encounters between jameson and alternative rock groups, new movies, and subcultures. At the same time, Burnham offers an extraordinary analysis of Jameson's work and career that refines and extends his most important themes.
In an unusual biographical move, Burnham negotiates Jameson's major works— including Marxism and Form, The Political Unconscious, and Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism-by way of his own working-class, queer-ish, Gen-X background and sensibility. Thus Burnham's study draws upon an immense range of references familiar to the MTV generation, including Reservoir Dogs, theorists Slavoj Zizek and Pierre Bourdieu, The Satanic Verses, Language poetry, the collapse of state communism in Eastern Europe, and the indie band Killdozer. In the process, Burnham addresses such Jamesonian questions as how to imagine the future, the role of utopianism in capitalist culture, and the continuing relevance of Marxist theory. Through its redefinition of Jameson's work and compelling reading of the political present, The Jamesonian Unconscious defines the leading edge of Marxist theory.
"Burnham's smart, loud, and hedonistic tour of Fredric Jameson's writings is full of surprises and new perspectives—not just on Jameson's work but on theory, politics, and culture more generally. Self-described 'brutalist,' Burnham's almost breathless way of approaching his topics is entertainingly origi-nal. He ends with a challenging 'synoptic' version of Jameson's work that will affect not only readers of Jameson's work, but anyone interested in the politics of cultural forms in the era of 'late capitalism.'"—PAUL SMITH, Carnegie Mellon University
"Clint Burnham gives Jameson's career a fantastic and impious and appealing new life. The Jamesonian Unconscious is a young, lively, street-wise, culturally cool reappropriation of a tradition of thought often associated with graying white male modernists. It has something of that elusive style I've heard personified, wistfully, as 'Camille Paglia of the left.' People will remember it when nine-tenths of the scholarly books published are just titles in a library catalog."—BRUCE ROBBINS, Rutgers University
Clint Burnham is an independent writer living in Toronto.
Post-Contemporary Interventions
A Series Edited by Stanley Fish & Fredric Jameson
VG copy
1990, English
Softcover, 258 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Rutgers University / New Jersey
$15.00 - In stock -
"Here is a film that is wise, sad, and often funny... effective and moving... complete in the way very few movies ever are."—Vincent Canby
Memories of Underdevelopment was the first great international success of Cuban cinema.
The film provides a complex portrait of Sergio, a disaffected bourgeois intellectual who remains in Havana after the Revolution, suspended between two worlds. He can no longer accept the values of his family's reactionary past and yet boredom and the conditioning of his early life prevent him from committing himself to the new revolutionary society. Sergio's story is played out in the turbulent period of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the 1962 missile crisis, events he can only watch on his television screen or from his apartment balcony.
Sergio's dilemma is expressed in the film through its mixture of cinematic styles; documentary footage from newsreels and fictional sequences, objective and subjective camerawork create a record of a present existence governed by memories of the past. The result is a film that is densely textured in its narrative and notable in its responsiveness to the psychological condition of its hero and to the political issues that he ignores.
The film, initially banned by the U.S. government as part of its trade quarantine of Cuba, was shown here five years after its original release. But American critics responded enthusiastically to it and the National Society of Film Critics bestowed an award on its director.
This new double volume includes the complete continuity script of Memories, as well as the complete novel, Inconsolable Memories, upon which the film is based.
An interview with Alea is reproduced here, as well as documentation of the political controversy that surrounded the film in this country. Michael Chanan's introduction places the film in the context of Cuban political and cultural history. The volume also includes a biographical sketch of Alea, a chronology of the Cuban Revolution, reviews, commentary, a filmography, and a bibliography.
Michael Chanan lives in England, where he teaches and writes on film. He is the author of The Cuban Image: Cinema and Cultural Politics in Cuba.
VG copy.
1996, English
Softcover, 270 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Verso / London
$35.00 - In stock -
A lively and lucid introduction to the work of Theodor Adorno
In the name of an assault on “totalization” and “identity,” a number of contemporary theorists have been busily washing Marxism’s dialectical and utopian projects down the plug-hole of postmodernism and “post-politics.” A case in point is recent interpretation of one of the greatest twentieth-century philosophers, Theodor Adorno. In this powerful book, Fredric Jameson proposes a radically different reading of Adorno’s work, especially of his major works on philosophy and aesthetics: Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory.
Jameson argues persuasively that Adorno’s contribution to the development of Marxism remains unique and indispensable. He shows how Adorno’s work on aesthetics performs deconstructive operations yet is in sharp distinction to the now canonical deconstructive genre of writing. He explores the complexity of Adorno’s very timely affirmation of philosophy — of its possibility after the “end” of grand theory. Above all, he illuminates the subtlety and richness of Adorno’s continuing emphasis on late capitalism as a totality within the very forms of our culture. In its lucidity, Late Marxism echoes the writing of its subject, to whose critical, utopian intelligence Jameson remains faithful.
"The most philosophically sophisticated and searching study of Theodor Adorno to appear in English ... powerful and persuasive."—The Nation
"[Jameson is a] prodigiously energetic thinker, whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction." —Terry Eagleton
VG copy.
1994, English
Softcover, 298 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Routledge / London
$30.00 - In stock -
First 1994 printing.
This collection explores, in Adorno's description, "philosophy directed against philosophy". The essays cover all aspects of Benjamin's writings, from his early work in the philosophy of art and language, through to the concept of history. The experience of time and the destruction of false continuity are identified as the key themes in Benjamin's understanding of history.
Edited by Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne
The Contributors: Howard Caygill, Alexander Garcia Düttman, Peter Osborne, Werner Hamacher, John Kraniauskas, Irving Wohlfarth, Rodolphe Gasché, Gertrud Koch, Andrew Benjamin, Rebecca Comay.
VG some mild edge wear to covers.
1988, English
Hardcover (w. dust jakcet), 314 pages, 23 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Cambridge University Press / Cambridge
$80.00 - In stock -
Rare first 1988 hardcover edition.
This is an interpretative and evaluative study of the thought of Antonio Gramsci, the founding father of the Italian Communist Party who died in 1937 after ten years of imprisonment in Fascist jails.
It proceeds by a rigorous textual analysis of his Prison Notebooks, the scattered notes he wrote during his incarceration. Professor Finocchiaro explores the nature of Gramsci's dialectical thinking, in order to show in what ways Gramsci was and was not a Marxist, as well as to illustrate correspondences with the work of Hegel, Croce, and Bukharin. The book provides a critical reappraisal of Gramsci as a thinker and of the dialectical approach as a mode of inquiry.
VG copy/VG dj.
1975, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 304 pages, 22.5 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Jonathan Cape / London
$50.00 - In stock -
First 1975 hardcover edition.
Selected, translated from the Italian and introduced by Lynne Lawner
'Antonio Gramsci has become something of a cult figure in the past few years. He was the one member of the Comintern who was uncontaminated by Stalinism... Instead of slavishly following the dictates of Moscow, Gramsci occupied his wretched years in the cells writing notebooks and letters sketching out a form of Marxism which was all his own.'—Maurice Cranston (Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics), Washington Post
Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) was one of the most original political thinkers in Western Marxism and an exceptional intellectual. Arrested and imprisoned by the Italian Fascist regime in 1926, Gramsci died before fully regaining his freedom, yet he wrote extensive letters while incarcerated, rich with insight into the physical and psychological tortures of prison. In meticulous detail, Gramsci records how political prisoners, himself included, contend with the fear of illness and death and the rules and regulations that threaten to efface their individuality. Forming an incomparable link between Gramsci's intellectual passion and his emotional vulnerability, Letters from Prison shows a man reconstructing his life while being separated from it, struggling to recapture the primary relationships that once defined his identity.
Lynne Lawner has here translated into English a selection of 93 of the prison letters of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), one of the greatest Marxist thinkers since Lenin and a founder of the Italian Communist Party.
VG copy in VG dust jacket preserved under mylar wrap.
1998, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 182 pages, 24 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Verso / London
$45.00 - In stock -
First 1998 hardcover edition.
“Elegant dissection of Brecht’s method, from estrangements to allegory and beyond.” —Modern Drama
The legacy of Bertolt Brecht is much contested, whether by those who wish to forget or to vilify his politics, but his stature as the outstanding political playwright and poet of the twentieth century is unforgettably established in this major critical work. Fredric Jameson elegantly dissects the intricate connections between Brecht’s drama and politics, demonstrating the way these combined to shape a unique and powerful influence on a profoundly troubled epoch.
Jameson sees Brecht’s method as a multi-layered process of reflection and self-reflection, reference and self-reference, which tears open a gap for individuals to situate themselves historically, to think about themselves in the third person, and to use that self-projection in history as a basis for judgment. Emphasizing the themes of separation, distance, multiplicity, choice and contradiction in Brecht’s entire corpus, Jameson’s study engages in a dialogue with a cryptic work, unpublished in Brecht’s lifetime, entitled Me-ti; Book of Twists and Turns. Jameson sees this text as key to understanding Brecht’s critical reflections on dialectics and his orientally informed fascination with flow and flux, change and the non-eternal.
For Jameson, Brecht is not prescriptive but performative. His plays do not provide answers but attempt to show people how to perform the act of thinking, how to begin to search for answers themselves. Brecht represents the ceaselessness of transformation while at the same time alienating it, interrupting it, making it comprehensible by making it strange. And thereby, in breaking it up by analysis, the possibility emerges of its reconstitution under a new law.
"Probably the most important cultural critic writing in English today ... it can truly be said that nothing cultural is alien to him."—Colin MacCabe
NF—F NF—F dust jacket.
1978, English / Italian
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 272 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
New Left Books (NLB) / Surrey
$20.00 - In stock -
First 1978 UK hardcover bi-lingual English/Italian edition of Galvano Della Volpe's Critique of Taste, published by New Left Books.
Galvano Della Volpe was the dominant philosopher of Italian Marxism for twenty years after the Liberation. His most important book was a work of aesthetic theory - Critique of Taste. Della Volpe, proponent of a robust materialism in all his writings, was concerned to rehabilitate the inherently rationally and intellectual nature of art. Opposing both the sociological reductionism of Plekhanov or Lukacs, and the formalist irrationalism of Croce or New Criticism, Della Volpe's aim was to demonstrate that conceptual meaning is always inseparable from aesthetic effect. Whether he is discussing Pindar or Gongora, Cleanth Brooks or Roland Barthes, Goethe or Mallarme, Della Volpe is always challenging, always illuminating. Critique of Taste represents one of the major crossroads of twentieth-century aesthetics.
Fine copy in NF dust jacket.
2004, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 116 pages, 19.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Continuum / London
$25.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition.
Art and Fear is compulsory reading for anyone still wondering where art has gone and where science is taking us. Paul Virilio traces the twin development of art and science over the 20th Century, a development that emerges as a nightmare dance of death. In Virilio's scorching vision, art and science vie with each other for the destruction of the human form as we know it. At the start of the 21st Century science has finally left art behind as genetic engineers prepare to turn themselves into the worst of expressionists, the Human Genome Project their godless manifesto, the human being, the raw material for new and monstrous forms of life. A brutal logic rules this shattering of representation: our ways of seeing are now fatally shaped by unprecedented 'scientific' modes of destruction.
VG in VG dust jacket.
1995, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 15.6 x 23.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Pluto Press / London-Sydney
$25.00 - In stock -
Louis Althusser is one of France's foremost intellectuals of the postwar period. Controversial and influential, his writings and reputation have extended beyond the boundaries of his own country to leave a lasting mark on the ideas of others. In turn, Althusser found inspiration in many of Lenin's ideas and, in the first significant study of this association, Majumdar offers an objective reevaluation of Althusser's overt espousal of Leninism during the two decades up to the end of the 1970s. Focusing specifically on Althusser's attempt to rehabilitate Lenin as an academically respectable philosopher, rather than as a politician, Majumdar takes the assessment forward to evaluate Lenin's legacy today. Althusser's neglect of the significant contribution Lenin made to political theory and his subsequent shift away from Leninism at the end of the 1970s are also examined.
Margaret A. Majumdar teaches French Political Thought at the University of Westminster and is a member of the University of Westminster Francophone Africa Research Centre. She co-edits the Bulletin of Francophone Africa and has written widely on politics and philosophy.
Very Good—Fine copy.
1951, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 184 pages, 32 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Swen Publications / New York
$25.00 - In stock -
1951 hardcover first edition.
"SINCE STALIN is a history of Communism.
SINCE STALIN is a contemporary history. The dark birth, the bloody adolescence, the sordid maturity of Communism are bracketed in our own lifetime.
SINCE STALIN is a true history. It traces the road of Communism with the original milestones re-stored, not as they have been shifted or shattered by the Kremlin's hacks and apologists. A complete bibliography-index cites the varied sources of the text, and each of the 425 photographs-many of them rare, some of them hitherto suppressed— has been painstakingly authenticated."
Good—VG copy in Average—Good dust jacket with wear to edges.
1978, English
Hardcover (w dust jacket), 286 pages, 22 x 31 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Holt Rinehart & Winston / Chicago
$20.00 - In stock -
First 1978 hardcover edition of Russia in Revolution, 1900-1930, Salisbury's narrative and pictorial portrait of the political and artistic upheaval that changed the course of Russian history and culture during the first three decades of the century. Profusely illustrated with photographic documents and graphics.
VG in G—VG dust jacket.
1986, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 184 pages, 25.5 x 19.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Weidenfeld & Nicholson / London
$25.00 - In stock -
First 1986 hardcover edition.
"Reg Gadney's chronicle of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 brings to life with accuracy the drama of that extraordinary event, which still today has the power in this book to move me to tears?"—Michael Korda, author of Charmed Lives
CRY HUNGARY! takes us straight back to those thirteen days in October, 1956, when the Hungarian people rose up against the crushing Soviet occupation of their country. It was a spontaneous people's uprising: Hungarians from every class and occupation banded together. Workers and intellectuals, in the capital Budapest, and in the provinces, demonstrated for freedom. Stalin's great statue was torn down and broken up in the streets; members of the hated secret police were hunted out and killed. The Hungarian army refused to act against their compatriots and politicians responded to their people's demands.
At first the Russians retreated, but when they saw that there was nothing to fear from the West but fine words, their tanks rolled back into Budapest. A frantic defence ensued, but the Hungarian people had no weapons to match the steel might of the USSR, and finally they were forced to admit that Russian imperial power would never be relaxed.
This tragic but inspiring story is told by Reg Gadney in a dramatic narrative that draws on radio transcripts and eyewitness accounts and is illustrated by the many starkly moving and memorable photographs taken by the great photo-journalists who were in Budapest that October. Today, as George Mikes in his introduction records, a prosperous and not altogether oppressed Hungary wishes to forget the blood and suffering of an older generation, but for the refugees who fled to Western Europe and to the United States, CRY HUNGARY! will provide a unique record of a tale of glorious victory and bitter defeat.
VG book VG DJ
1952, German
Hardcover (Vol. I w. dust jacket, clothbound), 272 + 272 pages, 30 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Burda Druck und Verlag / Baden
$90.00 - In stock -
Both volumes of The Second World War in Pictures / Der zweite Weltkrieg im Bild, Vol I — From Nürnberg to Stalingrad + Vol II — From Stalingrad to Nürnberg, clothbound and gilded hardcovers, published in 1952 by Burda Druck und Verlag, Baden. 544 pages of over 1200 gravure photographs with commentary documenting everything from the 1938 Nazi Party days to the Nuremberg trials. Many of the photos (German war photos and photos taken by the Allies) were never published before and none were sanitized, so readers would be confronted with every horrifying aspect of World War II. Incredible and harrowing imagery with beautiful printing.
Der Zweite Weltkrieg im Bild Volume I has coverage of the great triumphs and victories of the Third Reich. Nazi dignitaries admiring the might of the Wehrmacht at Reichsparteitag 1938, the September 1938 Munich Agreement, the Nazi invasion of Poland, the establishment of the first Jewish ghettos, the Wehrmacht in Norway, the victorious battle on the west front in 1940, U-Boot battle at Scapa Flow, air victories over England, the Italian entry into WW2, the Axis Agreement, the start of the war in the Balkans and Greece, the DAK in North Africa, the start of Operation Barbarossa, heavy fighting in Ukraine, Pearl Harbor, to the first defeat on the east front.
Der Zweite Weltkrieg im Bild Volume II shows the grim “Total War” in Germany. Defeat on the battlefield in the Soviet Union and Crimea, and destroyed Kriegsmarine ships and submarines at sea, the American entry in the war in North Africa, the D-Day invasion of Normandy and Allied landings in the south of France, the 20 July 1944 plot to kill Hitler, Allied air raids on German cities, the Battle of the Bulge, the Red Army in East Prussia, Silesia and Pomerania, the battle for Berlin, Hitler’s death, Hermann Goering’s capture, Mussolini’s end, German capitulation, the Potsdam Conference, all the way to the Nuernberg Trials.
Average—Good copies, volume I with poor dust jacket (creased and torn), both copies with with tanned page edges, rubbed/dusty cloth and wear to board extremities.
1988, English
Hardcover, 282 pages, 22 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Cambridge University Press / Cambridge
$45.00 - In stock -
Very rare first hardcover edition of Anna K. Kuhn's book-length chronological study in English of Christa Wolf's works, published by Cambridge in 1988. It traces the development and continuity of the writer's major themes and concerns against the backdrop of her constantly evolving relationship to Marxism, and documents the rise of her feminist consciousness. It does not, however, focus only on political and feminist issues, but addresses all facets of Wolf's identity by showing how her works reflect her own self-understanding. Forced by the clash between her vision of a humane socialism and the practice of socialism she observed in the German Democratic Republic to reassess her role as a writer and critic, Wolf broke through to her unique style in The Quest for Christa T., a work initially repudiated in the GDR both for its unorthodox subject matter and for its unconventional form. Since then, Wolf has effectively challenged the restrictions placed on writers in the GDR by writing on topics such as the Nazi past (Patterns of Childhood), Romanticism (No Place on Earth), patriarchal attitudes in the GDR (Cassandra) and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster (Storfall)."
Anna K. Kuhn's research interests include women's literature, feminist theory, film studies and German cultural studies.
VG copy w/o dust jacket. Note: not the 2009 re-issue often listed as a 1988 edition.
1977, English
Softcover, 222 pages, 19 x 11.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Seven Seas Books / Berlin
$45.00 - In stock -
Rare first 1977 English edition of this collection of important essays by German novelist and essayist Christa Wolf (1929—2011) first published in German in 1973. Translated here by Joan Becker.
"The Reader and the Writer consists of a number of essays and prose pieces by a leading writer of the German Democratic Republic and a concluding portrait of the author by biogeneticist, Hans Stubbe. "Writing," says Christa Wolf in the title essay, "is only one operation in a more complex process to which we give the splendid name of living." Her concern for literature's function within the context of life is a theme that runs through all her pieces. Whether she is describing the simple heroism of people she has encountered or reminiscences of a darker past or a visit to a biogeneticist at his research center her sense of vitality, honest quest for answers and warmth of personality are always present. Essays on other writers include those on Bertolt Brecht, Vera Inber, Ingeborg Bachmann, Fred Wander and Anna Seghers who come alive first as people and as writers whose works express the profound commitment of their lives. Another is a sketch that recalls a date in 1948 when she read her first Marxist book, Engels on Feuerbach, in which she underlined: "In the place of moribund reality comes a new viable reality. That was the process which was to fill my life..."—publisher's blurb
Christa Wolf (1929—2011) was German novelist and essayist. She is considered one of the most important writers to emerge from the former East Germany. Wolf was a German writer of rare purity and sensitivity who grew up under nazism and became an adult under communism. Her work records the impact of these ideologies on individual lives. She was, as one critic put it, "a writer of scrupulous 'touchstone' honesty", and it is the pursuit and uncovering of truth, under the most beleaguered circumstances, that defines her.
Good—VG copy. Clear laminate peeling with age at cover edges, repaired by some pieces of tape, cover in tact with only light edge wear. Binding and interior VG throughout., a well preserved copy.
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.
2023, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 22.86 x 15.24 cm
Published by
Latin American Research Commons / Mountain View
$49.00 - In stock -
Diamela Eltit's literary work emerged on the Chilean cultural scene in the 1980s when the Pinochet regime (1973-1990) had consolidated its project of extermination, censorship, and neoliberal shock therapy. Forced to write in a suffocating atmosphere of restriction and violence, Eltit boldly cultivated a radical, insurrectional poetics aimed at questioning the very underpinnings of authoritarian power and discourse.
While Eltit's novels, published between 1983 and the present, provide a remarkable vision of Chile that has evolved over the past decades, she offers a different vantage point through her prolific and rigorous cultivation of literary essays.
Translated for the first time into English, this collection of Eltit's essays allows readers to delve into her key concerns as a writer and intellectual: the neoliberal marketplace; the marginalization of bodies in society; questions of gender and power; struggles for memory, truth, and justice after dictatorship; and the ever-complex relationships among politics, ethics, and aesthetics.
Diamela Eltit (Santiago de Chile, 1947) is a Chilean writer and university professor. She is a recipient of the National Prize for Literature.
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
2024, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 334 pages, 32 x 22 cm
Published by
Centre Pompidou / Paris
$110.00 - Out of stock
The defining book for the centenary of Surrealism. From September 2024 to January 2025, the Centre Pompidou will celebrate the 100th anniversary of André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto. For the next two years, their unprecedented Surrealist exhibition will tour the art galleries of the world, accompanied by this special catalogue.
Perhaps more than any other artistic movement, Surrealism had a cataclysmic effect on the modern mind, changing forever the way we think about experiencing the world. By rejecting the gross linearity that typified several centuries of preceding artworks, the legendary Surrealists Magritte, Ernst, Carrington, Dali, Tanning and so many others reached beyond the facade of that which is patently visible and found something more. Featuring original essays from leading academics and excerpts from the Surrealist Manifesto itself, this stands among the most essential Surrealist catalogues ever published.