Calin-Andrei Mihailescu – författare

“A wondrously limpid testament to the pleasures of reading.” —Steven Poole, The GuardianSix incandescent lectures on literature from the patron saint of mirrors, metafiction, and infinite libraries.For more than thirty years, Jorge Luis Borges’s Norton Lectures went unpublished. Recorded at Harvard in 1967 and 1968, the tapes gathered dust in a library vault until their discovery after his death. It was a twist that the author of Labyrinths would have relished. This volume assembles the recovered materials, offering a priceless window into the Argentinian master’s lifelong love affair with the English language.This Craft of Verse captures the cadences, candor, wit, and erudition of one of the twentieth century’s enduring literary voices. Though his avowed topic is poetry, Borges explores subjects ranging from prose forms—especially the novel—to literary history, translation theory, and philosophical aspects of communication writ large. Borges here draws on a wide range of literary examples—modern and medieval English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, and Chinese. He brings characteristic eloquence and inexhaustible enthusiasm to readings of Plato, the Old Norse kenningar, Byron, Poe, Chesterton, Joyce, and Frost, as well as translations of Homer, the Bible, and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.Whether discussing metaphor, the origins of verse, or his own “poetic creed,” Borges gives a performance as entertaining as it is intellectually engaging. A lesson in the love of literature and the making of a unique artistic sensibility, This Craft of Verse is a sustained encounter with one of the writers whose place in the twentieth century will be forever remembered.

Novels, movies, and lies – these are all fictions that provoke with their as ifs and what ifs. In response to the idea that fiction has somehow become an unfashionable topic in contemporary criticism, this volume argues that the question of fiction needs to be updated in the absence of a widely accepted theory of truth. This collection, dedicated to the noted scholar and literary critic Lubomir Dolezel, covers an extensive number of theoretical and historical issues relevant to our understanding of the status of fictions – literary or not. Fiction Updated offers approaches to fiction and poetics that, in an imaginary topography of contemporary humanities, dwell at a distance from both the mimetic theory of literature and deconstruction. The contributors introduce new perspective to the problem of fictionality, or broaden the scope of its applications, by examining the works of such authors as Homer, Casanova, Aristotle, Woolf, Vaihinger, Borges, Kundera, Coetzee, and Bakhtin. The collection is divided into six thematic sections. The first includes papers that attempt to approach the issue of fictionality from philosophical perspective. The second section is also theoretical and concentrates on models. The third emphasizes the more concrete problems of fictional worlds, such as character, genre, and gender. The four section deals with fiction and history, while the fifth treats poetics. The las section focuses on the contribution of Lubomir Dolezel to the theory of fictionality and fictional semantics.

The present age of omnipresent terrorism is also an era of ever-expanding policing. What is the meaning — and the consequences — of this situation for literature and literary criticism? Policing Literary Theory attempts to answer these questions presenting intriguing and critical analyses of the interplays between police/policing and literature/literary criticism in a variety of linguistic milieus and literary traditions: American, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and others. The volume explores the mechanisms of formulation of knowledge about literature, theory, or culture in general in the post-Foucauldian surveillance society. Topics include North Korean dictatorship, spy narratives, censorship in literature and scholarship, Russian and Soviet authoritarianism, Eastern European cultures during communism, and Kafka’s work.Contributors: Vladimir Biti, Reingard Nethersole, Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu, Sowon Park, Marko Juvan, Kyohei Norimatsu, Péter Hajdu, Norio Sakanaka, John Zilcosky, Yvonne Howell, and Takayuki Yokota-Murakami.