In Ukraine, War, Love, Olena Stiazhkina depicts day-to-day developments in and around her beloved hometown Donetsk during Russia’s 2014 invasion and occupation of the Ukrainian city. An award-winning fiction writer, Stiazhkina chronicles an increasingly harrowing series of events with sarcasm, anger, humor, and love.
The diary opens on March 2, 2014, as the first wave of pro-Russian protest washes over eastern Ukraine in the wake of Euromaidan, the Revolution of Dignity, and it closes on August 18, 2014, the day a convoy of civilian Ukrainian refugees is deliberately slaughtered by Russian forces. Early on, Stiazhkina is captured by pro-Russian forces while she browses for books but is freed when one of her captors turns out to be a former student. Vignettes from her personal life intermingle with current events, and she examines ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. We walk with local dogs and their owners; we meet a formidable apartment building manager who shames occupiers and dismantles their artillery from the roof of her building; we follow a family evacuated to Kyiv whose young son builds checkpoints out of Legos. Olena Stiazhkina’s Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary is a fierce love letter to her country, her city, and her people.
Winner of the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award
Recipient, 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship
Around 1900, when the last blank spaces on their maps were filled, Europeans traveled to far-flung places hoping to find the spectacularly foreign. They discovered instead what Freud called, several years later, the uncannily familiar: disturbing reflections of themselves—either actual Europeans or Westernized natives. This experience was most extreme for German travelers, who arrived in the contact zones late, on the heels of other European colonialists, and it resulted not in understanding or tolerance but in an increased propensity for violence and destruction. The quest for a “virginal,” exotic existence proved to be ruined at its source, mirroring back to the travelers demonic parodies of their own worst aspects. In this strikingly original book, John Zilcosky demonstrates how these popular “uncanny” encounters influenced Freud’s—and the literary modernists’—use of the term, and how these encounters remain at the heart of our cross-cultural anxieties today.
More than 120 years after Oscar Wilde submitted The Picture of Dorian Gray for publication in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, the uncensored version of his novel appears here for the first time in a paperback edition. This volume restores all of the material removed by the novel’s first editor.
Upon receipt of the typescript, Wilde’s editor panicked at what he saw. Contained within its pages was material he feared readers would find “offensive”—especially instances of graphic homosexual content. He proceeded to go through the typescript with his pencil, cleaning it up until he made it “acceptable to the most fastidious taste.” Wilde did not see these changes until his novel appeared in print. Wilde’s editor’s concern was well placed. Even in its redacted form, the novel caused public outcry. The British press condemned it as “vulgar,” “unclean,” “poisonous,” “discreditable,” and “a sham.” When Wilde later enlarged the novel for publication in book form, he responded to his critics by further toning down its “immoral” elements.
Wilde famously said that The Picture of Dorian Gray “contains much of me”: Basil Hallward is “what I think I am,” Lord Henry “what the world thinks me,” and “Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.” Wilde’s comment suggests a backward glance to a Greek or Dorian Age, but also a forward-looking view to a more permissive time than his own repressive Victorian era. By implication, Wilde would have preferred we read today the uncensored version of his novel.
“What a strange invention marriage is!” wrote Kierkegaard. “Is it the expression of that inexplicable erotic sentiment, that concordant elective affinity of souls, or is it a duty or a partnership . . . or is it a little of all that?”
Like Kierkegaard a few decades later, many of Germany’s most influential thinkers at the turn of the eighteenth century wondered about the nature of marriage but rejected the easy answers provided by biology and theology. In Uncivil Unions, Adrian Daub presents a truly interdisciplinary look at the story of a generation of philosophers, poets, and intellectuals who turned away from theology, reason, common sense, and empirical observation to provide a purely metaphysical justification of marriage.
Through close readings of philosophers like Fichte and Schlegel, and novelists like Sophie Mereau and Jean Paul, Daub charts the development of this new concept of marriage with an insightful blend of philosophy, cultural studies, and theory. The author delves deeply into the lives and work of the romantic and idealist poets and thinkers whose beliefs about marriage continue to shape ideas about gender, marriage, and sex to the present day.
Understanding Tolstoy recreates Tolstoy’s lifelong artistic and spiritual journey, taking readers to the core of the writer’s world through nuanced close readings of his major novels and novellas. Andrew D. Kaufman’s broad and accessible analysis of Tolstoy’s work speaks to the ways in which Tolstoy, despite living in a manner far removed from the experiences of most modern-day Americans, is still applicable and contemporary.
From a reconstruction of Olenin’s search for truth in The Cossacks to an illuminating analysis of Hadji-Murat’s tragic last stand, Understanding Tolstoy brings to life the fascinating parallels between Tolstoy’s personal quest and his characters’ journeys. Whether writing about the ballrooms and battlefields of War and Peace or the spectrum of sexual and spiritual attachments in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy emerges as a vital, searching artist who continually grows and surprises us, yet is driven by a single, unchanging belief in universal human truths.
Understanding Tolstoy is a treasure trove of critical and philosophical insights that will appeal to Tolstoy aficionados of all kinds, from advanced scholars to undergraduate students. The book offers an eminently readable guide to those entering Tolstoy’s world for the first time or the tenth, and it invites them to grapple alongside the writer and his characters with the most urgent existential questions of our time, and all times.
Au fil de ses recherches, Benjamin se rend à l’évidence : il faudra que son Livre des passages soit enrichi par des images. Une « documentation visuelle » se constitue bientôt, écrit-il, glanée pour l’essentiel dans les recueils du Cabinet des estampes de la Bibliothèque nationale où il travaille pendant son exil parisien. Une centaine de notes témoignent de cette collecte et conservent, enfermée dans leurs plis, la mention d’une ou de plusieurs images qui sont restées pour la plupart inconnues jusqu’ici.
Steffen Haug a voulu retrouver cette réserve enfouie. Gravures et dessins de presse, tracts, réclames, affiches et photographies, de Meryon et Grandville à Daumier, en passant par l’infinie cohorte anonyme et le tout-venant de la production visuelle à grand tirage du XIXe siècle : la moisson rapportée ici est surprenante. Elle invite à lire ou relire les Passages en faisant à l’image toute la place qu’elle occupe dans la pensée du dernier Benjamin, à l’heure où s’élaborent, sous la menace de temps assombris, son essai « L’œuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproductibilité technique », le projet de livre sur Baudelaire ou ses « Thèses sur le concept d’histoire ».
The year 1984 is just a memory, but the catchwords of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four still routinely pepper public discussions of topics ranging from government surveillance and privacy invasion to language corruption and bureaucratese. Orwell's work pervades the cultural imagination, while others of his literary generation are long forgotten. Exploring this astonishing afterlife has become the scholarly vocation of John Rodden, who is now the leading authority on the reception, impact, and reinvention of George Orwell—the man and writer—as well as of "Orwell" the cultural icon and historical talisman.
In The Unexamined Orwell, Rodden delves into dimensions of Orwell's life and legacy that have escaped the critical glare. Rodden discusses how several leading American intellectuals have earned the title of Orwell's "successor," including Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, Christopher Hitchens, and John Lukacs. He then turns to Germany and focuses on the role and relevance of Nineteen Eighty-Four in the now-defunct communist nation of East Germany. Rodden also addresses myths that have grown up around Orwell's life, including his "more than half-legendary" encounter with Ernest Hemingway in liberated Paris in March 1945, and analyzes literary issues such as his utopian sensibility and his prose style. Finally, Rodden poses the endlessly debated question, "What Would George Orwell Do?," and speculates about how the prophet of Nineteen Eighty-Four would have reacted to world events. In so doing, Rodden shows how our responses to this question reveal much about our culture's ongoing need to reappropriate "Orwell."
Edward Engelberg argues that Conscience and Consciousness have slowly drifted apart from their once nearly identical meanings: inward knowledge of oneself. This process of separation, he shows, reached a critical point in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the age of "dualisms."
Tracing the evolution of the severance of Conscience from Consciousness, he demonstrates from a wide range of examples in literature and philosophy how such a division shaped the attitudes of important writers and thinkers. The study opens with the Romantics and closes with Kafka, Hesse, and Camus. It includes analyses of Hegel, Dostoevsky, James, Conrad, and Freud and brings together for comparison such pairings as Poe and Mann, Goethe and Wordsworth, Arnold and Nietzsche.
Engelberg concludes that the cleavage of Conscience from Consciousness is untenable. To dispossess Conscience, he asserts, man would also need to dispossess a full awareness, a full Consciousness; and a full Consciousness inevitably leads back to Conscience.
The Unremarkable Wordsworth was first published in 1987. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
William Wordsworth was attacked by the critics of his time for imposing unremarkable sights and sentiments on his audience. In this book's title essay, an exemplary reading of the Westminster Bridge sonnet, Geoffrey Hartman shows how Wordsworth's "unremarkable phrases" attain their curious vigor. Drawing upon the propositions of semiological analysis—that signs are not signs unless they become perceptible, through the contrast between "marked" and "unmarked"—Hartman, in a deft and sensitive analysis, is able to play these notions of marking and the unremarkable off against each other. Wordsworth, in the end, overcomes both his critics and the science of signs: his quiet sonnet—with its muted or near-absent signs—is itself, as epitaph for an era, a faithful sign of the times.
Hartman's capacity to open up a dialogue between contemporary theory and Wordsworth's poetry informs all of these essays, written since the 1964 publication of Wordsworth's Poetry, a book that marked an epoch in the study of that poet and of Romantic poetry in general. In the years since then, the nature of literary study has changed dramatically, and Hartman has been a leader in the turn to theoretical modes of interpretation. The fifteen essays in The Unremarkable Wordsworth draw upon a wide range of contemporary theoretical approaches, from psychoanalysis to structuralism, from deconstruction to phenomenology. Yet, as Donald Marshall points out in his foreword, "Wordsworth remains so much the focus of this book that 'critical method' is strangely transmuted." For Hartman, reading and thinking are inseparable; he has an uncanny power to convey in an intensified form the poet's own consciousness, not under the rubric of "intertextuality" but because he "has ears to hear."
Geoffrey H. Hartman is Karl Young Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University. His most recent book is Easy Pieces. Donald G. Marshall is a professor of English at the University of Iowa.
Migrants made up a growing class of workers in late sixteenth- and seventeenth- century England. In fact, by 1650, half of England’s rural population consisted of homeless and itinerant laborers. Unsettled is an ambitious attempt to reconstruct the everyday lives of these dispossessed people. Patricia Fumerton offers an expansive portrait of unsettledness in early modern England that includes the homeless and housed alike.
Fumerton begins by building on recent studies of vagrancy, poverty, and servants, placing all in the light of a new domestic economy of mobility. She then looks at representations of the vagrant in a variety of pamphlets and literature of the period. Since seamen were a particularly large and prominent class of mobile wage-laborers in the seventeenth century, Fumerton turns to seamen generally and to an individual poor seaman as a case study of the unsettled subject: Edward Barlow (b. 1642) provides a rare opportunity to see how the laboring poor fashioned themselves, for he authored a journal of over 225,000 words and 147 pages of drawings. Barlow’s journal, studied extensively here for the first time, vividly charts what he himself termed his “unsettled mind” and the perpetual anxieties of England’s working and wayfaring poor. Ultimately, Fumerton explores representations of seamen as unsettled in the broadside ballads of Barlow’s time.
What happens when operas that are comfortably ensconced in the canon are thoroughly rethought and radically recast on stage? What does a staging do to our understanding of an opera, and of opera generally? While a stage production can disrupt a work that was thought to be established, David J. Levin here argues that the genre of opera is itself unsettled, and that the performance of operas, at its best, clarifies this condition by bringing opera’s restlessness and volatility to life.
Unsettling Opera explores a variety of fields, considering questions of operatic textuality, dramaturgical practice, and performance theory. Levin opens with a brief history of opera production, opera studies, and dramatic composition, and goes on to consider in detail various productions of the works of Wagner, Mozart, Verdi, and Alexander Zemlinsky. Ultimately, the book seeks to initiate a dialogue between scholars of music, literature, and performance by addressing questions raised in each field in a manner that influences them all.
The 1932–33 Norton Lectures are among the best and most important of T. S. Eliot’s critical writings. Tracing the rise of literary self-consciousness from the Elizabethan period to his own day, Eliot does not simply examine the relation of criticism to poetry, but invites us to “start with the supposition that we do not know what poetry is, or what it does or ought to do, or of what use it is; and try to find out, in examining the relation of poetry to criticism, what the use of both of them is.”
Eliot begins with the appearance of poetry criticism in the age of Dryden, when poetry became the province of an intellectual aristocracy rather than part of the mind and popular tradition of a whole people. Wordsworth and Coleridge, in their attempt to revolutionize the language of poetry at the end of the eighteenth century, made exaggerated claims for poetry and the poet, culminating in Shelley’s assertion that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.” And, in the doubt and decaying moral definitions of the nineteenth century, Arnold transformed poetry into a surrogate for religion.
By studying poetry and criticism in the context of its time, Eliot suggests that we can learn what is permanent about the nature of poetry, and makes a powerful case for both its autonomy and its pluralism in this century.
“The history of interpretation, the skills by which we keep alive in our minds the light and dark of past literature and past humanity, is to an incalculable extent a history of error.” So writes Frank Kermode of a history to which he has contributed many luminous pages. This book is a record of Kermode’s “error,” his wandering through literature past and present. He notes that “in thirty-odd years I have written several hundred reviews, an example I would strongly urge the young not to follow.” From these hundreds Kermode has selected the pieces he treasures most, and they provide an example that indeed will be difficult to follow.
The Uses of Error contains some of Kermode’s very best writing. Again and again he proves himself to be more than a commentator or chronicler; he is rather a creator of cultural value in his interaction with the texts at hand. The appeal of this book is broad. Everything is here from Augustine to Ariès on death and dying, from Wilde to Woolf and writer’s block, from Joachim of Fiore to Flaubert’s Parrot. In a phrase or an aside on any of these subjects Kermode can open a vista, wither a reputation, or spotlight an intellectual mantrap.
The core of the volume is a group of essays on the central figures of modern English literature. Kermode tells more here—about Tennyson, Shaw, Forster, and Eliot—than most people could in twice the space. His brief, vivid, and sympathetic writings extol the range of British writing and mark out the difference between an interest that is solely academic and the richer view of one who writes from inside the culture and shares a common experience with its interpreters.
There is also Kermode the man. He saves a set of autobiographical essays until the end, and they are a veritable dessert for those who read the volume straight through. But they will stand first in the reader’s memory afterward, because they give body to the mind so clearly in evidence throughout the book. Kermode shows us the means by which he gained the perspective to become a transnational critic—not a critic on the margin, but one who shows us where the margins are. For anyone who is not yet familiar with Frank Kermode’s work, this is the place to begin. For those who are already acquainted with it, here is the chance to see the pattern of the whole.
What is utopia if not a perfect world, impossible to achieve? Anahid Nersessian reveals a basic misunderstanding lurking behind that ideal. In Utopia, Limited she enlists William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and others to redefine utopianism as a positive investment in limitations. Linking the ecological imperative to live within our means to the aesthetic philosophy of the Romantic period, Nersessian’s theory of utopia promises not an unconditionally perfect world but a better world where we get less than we hoped, but more than we had.
For the Romantic writers, the project of utopia and the project of art were identical. Blake believed that without limits, a work of art would be no more than a set of squiggles on a page, or a string of nonsensical letters and sounds. And without boundaries, utopia is merely an extension of the world as we know it, but blighted by a hunger for having it all. Nersessian proposes that we think about utopia as the Romantics thought about aesthetics—as a way to bind and thereby emancipate human political potential within a finite space.
Grounded in an intellectual tradition that begins with Immanuel Kant and includes Theodor Adorno and Northrop Frye, Utopia, Limited lays out a program of “adjustment” that applies the lessons of art to the rigors of life on an imperiled planet. It is a sincere response to environmental devastation, offering us a road map through a restricted future.
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