Lit Pickup

Given the ludic vitality of Kinbote’s portions of the book, it is not surprising that Shade’s subtle, meticulously wrought poem should have received short shrift. Most readers tend to think of the poem as the grace that must be perfunctorily said before we sit down to the meal of the commentary. It is this imbalance that a new edition of “Pale Fire” seeks to redress. In a move that is likely to irritate and scandalize many, Gingko Press has lifted Shade’s poem from Nabokov’s novel and published it as a separate book.

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Except from: The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time by Jane Gallop. Duke University Press, 2011.

I go back to Roland Barthes to see what he meant by the catch phrase and also to get a fuller sense of his theory of the author. In Barthes’ writing about authors, we find actually two deaths — the abstract, polemical death of the slogan and a moving, more bodily death of the mortal author. I attempt to connect the two deaths, to think the abstract theoretical death along with the real loss of the author. The title of my book, “The Deaths of the Author,” is meant to refer to both the literary theoretical concept and the real life drama, to make it impossible to think about either separately, to insist we think them together.

Read more.

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Vient de paraître:

L’écrivain rêvé de Casanova est une figure du dégagement. Le Vénitien veut communiquer ses idées, mais esquiver leur imputation ; écrire sa vie, mais éviter les conséquences de la reddition de compte et du dévoilement. L’écrivain en ses fictions, entre objet social, enjeu moral, instance imaginaire et figure impliquée par les textes, vise à comprendre la construction de cet écrivain éludant idéalement les identifications, son articulation avec une pensée et une éthique du « faire comme si », les relations entre l’Histoire de ma vie et la fiction comme fait anthropologique, cadre pragmatique et institution au sein d’une culture. Trois formules de Casanova organisent l’enquête : savoir écrire, communiquer ses idées, communiquer ses actions.

Classiques Garnier, coll. L’Europe des Lumières, 2011.

N° 9, 474 p., 58 € TTC

ISBN: 978-2-8124-0288-3

www.classiques-garnier.com

Comment on essays from October 6th to November 14th, 2011.

Has the digital revolution transformed how we write about the past — or not? Have new technologies changed our essential work-craft as scholars, and the ways in which we think, teach, author, and publish? Does the digital age have broader implications for individual writing processes, or for the historical profession at large? Explore these questions in Writing History in the Digital Age, a born-digital edited volume, under contract with the University of Michigan Press for the Digital Humanities Series of its digitalculturebooks imprint.

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Craig Koslofsky
EVENING’S EMPIRE
A history of the night in early modern Europe

In 1710, Richard Steele wrote in Tatler that recently he had been to visit an old friend just come up to town from the country. But the latter had already gone to bed when Steele called at 8 pm. He returned at 11 o’clock the following morning, only to be told that his friend had just sat down to dinner. “In short”, Steele commented, “I found that my old-fashioned friend religiously adhered to the example of his forefathers, and observed the same hours that had been kept in his family ever since the Conquest”. During the previous generation or so, elites across Europe had moved their clocks forward by several hours. No longer a time reserved for sleep, the night time was now the right time for all manner of recreational and representational purposes. This is what Craig Koslofsky calls “nocturnalisation”, defined as “the ongoing expansion of the legitimate social and symbolic uses of the night”, a development to which he awards the status of “a revolution in early modern Europe”.

En entrant dans l’ère de l’informatique en réseau, le livre devient inscriptible. Son développement ne suit plus la ligne droite de la traditionnelle chaîne du livre, mais se diffuse par ramifications réticulaires. Comme un oignon, il se pare de multiples couches d’informations, ajoutées par différents métiers, mais aussi par les lecteurs. Ensemble, ils participent à une vaste entreprise d’enrichissement documentaire qui multiplie les grilles de lecture du texte et en fait miroiter les multiples sens. Inscriptible, le livre s’insère désormais dans un système d’information riche, polymorphe, mouvant et encore très fragile. C’est le Read/Write Book.

Includes recommended books on the state of theory today.