Concerned in part with the act of collecting, The Tears of Things is itself a collection of exemplary art objects—literary and cultural attempts to control and possess things—including paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe and René Magritte; ...

The mark is the present moment of writing. It follows that if we give some thought to marks, we will also learn something about writing. The mark takes place in a certain space, from which it distinguishes itself. In George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form, a right-angle mark becomes the founding gesture for a study of distinction, space, and the relations between them. The Spencer-Brown mark is presented as the elegant minimum needed to convey the idea of “continence” or spatial enclosure. (...) Repetitive attempts to enclose a space are evident in the earliest circular scribbles of children. Serge Tisseron suggests that, later on, filling the space of a page with words proceeds by a similar circularity: thoughts are thrown out from an elusive inner space and pulled back in the form of written lines. When words fail us, we may revert to marks—as in cases of graphomania, like those of Emma Hauk and Charles Crumb. The artist Irma Blank devoted a lifetime to exploring the nature of writing through various forms of marking. Her series titled Eigenschriften presents a ritually repeated act of self-making through the mark. (shrink)

Philosophy and Kafka is a collection of original essays interrogating the relationship of literature and philosophy. The essays either discuss specific philosophical commentaries on Kafka’s work, consider the possible relevance of certain philosophical outlooks for examining Kafka’s writings, or examine Kafka’s writings in terms of a specific philosophical theme, such as communication and subjectivity, language and meaning, knowledge and truth, the human/animal divide, justice, and freedom.

The fiftieth anniversary edition of the Petit Robert dictionary has an unusual feature: color inserts of paintings that attempt to depict the force fields shared by twenty-two pairs of words. This interposition is the result of a two-year collaboration between the dictionary’s editor, Alain Rey, and the artist Fabienne Verdier. Together, they are perversely resisting the usual project of dictionaries: to separate words from each other through precise definitions. Verdier’s work combines the practices of Eastern calligraphy, which she studied for (...) ten years in China, with large-scale Western abstraction. Each of the Petit Robert paintings emerges from a long process of research, pondering, and drafting. The final painting, though, is made in an instant. In that moment, Verdier, with the full force of her body, swiftly moves a giant brush over a carefully prepared canvas. If the result does not capture the power she seeks, the canvas is discarded. There are no second thoughts or touch-ups. In a way, then, she is painting blind. Jacques Derrida’s ideas in Memoirs of the Blind apply both to painting and to writing: what comes to pass in both arts does so in the moment by means of forces that are never wholly under control or predictable. In contrast to the limiting act of a definition, the force field between words is generative, even while it must necessarily elude our understanding. (shrink)

Abstract:Though we forget most of the fiction that we read, something remains. This essay asks what forms that "something" might take in readers' memories, a question that recurs in the work of the Australian writer Gerald Murnane. When a novel's plot lines and visualized incidents have faded away, there may still linger an atmosphere peculiar to it, which is evoked by its title.

Is there really such a thing as a masculine style of writing? What are its characteristics and why just these characteristics? Can we distinguish the masculine style from the explicit masculine content? The writers I will examine in this context are necessarily a selection from the number of those who might be included. They are all twentieth-century authors. Perhaps, as Woolf suggests in A Room of One's Own, it is because of the beginnings of the women's movement in the preceding (...) century that "virility has now become self-conscious."1 At any rate there seems to be little explicit questioning of the male role, in literature or outside it, until our own century. I do not mean to suggest, however, that these writers only question the received images of maleness; often they set out to validate those images or, through such images, to validate themselves. Their explorations of maleness are not abstract but intensely individual. They are not straightforward but riddled with contradictions and paradoxes. As a result, it is difficult to extract didactic points from their works. Always knowledge is rooted in experience and inseparable from it. The masculine mode is above all an attempt to render a certain maleness of experience. · 1. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own , p. 105. Peter Schwenger, assistant professor of English at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, has written Phallic Critiques, which examines the relation between masculinity and literary styles. See also: "Virginia Woolf's Criticism: A Polemical Preface" by Barbara Currier Bell and Carol Ohmann in Vol. 1, No. 2. (shrink)

It was a novel, among other things, which originated the atomic bomb. H. G. Wells dedicated The World Set Free, published in 1913, to Frederick Soddy, a pioneer in the exploration of radioactivity. Using Soddy’s research as a base, Wells predicted the advent of artificial radioactivity in 1933, the year in which it actually took place; and he foresaw its use for what he named the “atomic bomb.” In Wells’ novel these bombs are used in a world war that erupts (...) in mid-century and is so catastrophic that a world government is formed, initiating a new age powered by the peaceful use of the atom. The physicist Leo Szilard, a long-time admirer of Wells, read this novel in 1932, the year before he first intuited the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction. The novel seems to have become part of his own mental chain reaction. One that took place at an almost unconscious level during the spring that Szilard spent at the Strand Palace Hotel in London, by his own admission doing nothing. He would only monopolize the bath from around nine to twelve in the morning, since “there is no place as good to think as a bathtub.”1 The theories that resulted from this prolonged immersion were introduced by references to Wells; and Szilard, having realized the atomic bomb, spent the rest of his life trying to realize the world government which, in the Wells novel, was its consequence.Literature, which was part of the genesis of nuclear weaponry, continues to be an inextricable aspect of its nature. For Derrida, in fact, we are facinga phenomenon whose essential feature is that of being fabulously textual, through and through. Nuclear weaponry depends, more than any weaponry in the past, it seems, upon structures of information and communication, structures of language, including non-vocalizable language, structures of codes and graphic decoding. But the phenomenon if fabulously textual also to the extent that, at the moment, a nuclear war has not taken place: one can only talk and write about it.2The linguistic nature of the arms race, of peace talks and negotiations, has been thoroughly analyzed. Likewise there is a growing number of books on the nature of nuclear war. But there is also a growing body of novels, poems, and plays making up a literature of nuclear holocaust. As the example of Wells’ novel shows, this is not altogether unprecedented; nuclear literature predates Hiroshima. But the subject of nuclear war has, up till now, mainly served the purposes of science fiction; only rarely—as in the cases of A Canticle for Leibowitz and On the Beach—have science fiction authors risen above the lowest common denominator of that genre. In the 1980s, every year sees the publication of works which demand serious attention both as literature and as fictive strategies for comprehending a subject that is commonly called “unthinkable.” Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, Bernard Malamud’s God’s Grace, Maggie Gee’s The Burning Book, Tim O’Brien’s Nuclear Age—these works explicitly preoccupied with nuclear holocaust may be supplemented by other works of the eighties with a persistent apocalyptic undertone, works such as Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series, Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, and Mario Vargas Llosa’s War of the End of the World. And these are only the literary manifestations of a widespread movement in all the arts aimed at expressing the dominant condition of our time.3 1. Leo Szilard, Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts: Selected Recollections and Correspondence, ed. Spencer R. Weart and Gertrud Weiss Szilard , p. 19.2. Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now ,” Diacritics 14 , p. 23.3. Examples can be found in painting , mixed media , opera , oratorio , dance , film , television , and popular music . Peter Schwenger is associate professor of English at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The author of Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth-Century Literature, he is working on a book-length study of nuclear holocaust literature. (shrink)

As an alternative to universalism and particularism, Intermedialities: Philosophy, Arts, Politics proposes "intermedialities" as a new model of social relations and intercultural dialogue. The concept of "intermedialities" stresses the necessity of situating debates concerning social relations in the divergent contexts of new media and avant-garde artistic practices as well as feminist, political, and philosophical analyses.