Timothy Mathews - Böcker

Tradition, Trauma, Translation is concerned with how Classic texts - mainly Greek and Latin but also Arabic and Portuguese - become present in later cultures and how they resonate in the modern. A distinguished international team of contributors and responders examine the topic in different ways. Some discuss singular encounters with the Classic - those of Heaney, Pope, Fellini, Freud, Ibn Qutayba, Cavafy and others - and show how translations engage with the affective impact of texts over time and space. Poet-translator contributors draw on their own experience here. Others offer images of translation: as movement of a text over time, space, language, and culture. Some of these images are resistant, even violent: tradition as silencing, translation as decapitation, cannibalistic reception. Others pose searching questions about the interaction of modernity with tradition: what is entailed in 'The Price of the Modern'? Drawing, as it does, on Classical, Modernist, Translation, Reception, Comparative Literary, and Intercultural Studies, the volume has the potential to suggest critiques of practice in these disciplines but also concerns that are common to all these fields.

In Literature, Art and the Pursuit of Decay, Timothy Mathews examines work by a range of writers and painters working in France in the twentieth century. The well-illustrated book engages with canonical figures - Guillaume Apollinaire, Marguerite Duras and Jean Genet, Roland Barthes, Pablo Picasso and René Magritte - as well as more neglected individuals including Robert Desnos and Jean Fautrier. Mathews draws on psychoanalysis, existentialism and poststructuralism to show how both literature and fine art promote the value of generosity in a culture of anxiety and intolerance. Decay emerges as a surprising ally in this quest because of its ability to undermine intellectual complacency and egoism. Integrating theoretical and material approaches to reading and viewing, Mathews engages with the distinctive features of different literary genres and different types of painting to develop an original history of artistic ambition in twentieth-century France.

In Literature, Art and the Pursuit of Decay, Timothy Mathews examines work by a range of writers and painters working in France in the twentieth century. The well-illustrated book engages with canonical figures - Guillaume Apollinaire, Marguerite Duras and Jean Genet, Roland Barthes, Pablo Picasso and René Magritte - as well as more neglected individuals including Robert Desnos and Jean Fautrier. Mathews draws on psychoanalysis, existentialism and poststructuralism to show how both literature and fine art promote the value of generosity in a culture of anxiety and intolerance. Decay emerges as a surprising ally in this quest because of its ability to undermine intellectual complacency and egoism. Integrating theoretical and material approaches to reading and viewing, Mathews engages with the distinctive features of different literary genres and different types of painting to develop an original history of artistic ambition in twentieth-century France.

Alberto Giacometti's attenuated figures of the human form are among the most significant artistic images of the twentieth century. Jean-Paul Sartre and Andre Breton are just two of the great thinkers whose thought has been nurtured by the graceful, harrowing work of Giacometti, which continues to resonate with artists, writers and audiences. Timothy Mathews explores fragility, trauma, space and relationality in Giacometti's art and writing and the capacity to relate that emerges. In doing so, he draws upon the novels of W.G. Sebald, Samuel Beckett and Cees Nooteboom and the theories of Maurice Blanchot and Bertolt Brecht; and recasts Giacometti's Le Chariot as Walter Benjamin's angel of history. This book invites readers on a voyage of discovery through Giacometti's deep concerns with memory, attachment and humanity. Both a critical study of Giacometti's work and an immersion in its affective power, it asks what encounters with Giacometti's pieces can tell us about our own time and our own ways of looking; and about the humility of relating to art.

As the French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault defined the concept, 'biopolitics' is the extension of state control over both the physical and political bodies of a population. Poetic Biopolitics is a positive attempt to explain and show how the often destructive effects and affects of biopolitical power structures can be deconstructed not only critically but poetically in the arts and humanities: in architecture, art, literature, modern languages, performance studies, film and philosophy. It is an interdisciplinary response to the contemporary global crisis of community conflict, social and environmental wellbeing. Structured in three parts - biopolitical bodies and imaginaries, voices and bodies, and social and environmental turbulence - this innovative book meshes performative and visual poetics with critical theory and feminist philosophy. It examines the complex expressions of our physical and psychic lives through artefact, body, dialogue, image, installation and word.

«Alia Soliman’s re-assessment of the motif of the doppelgänger moves it comprehensively into the twenty-first century and adds new dimensions to the figure. Here, through incisive readings, the double is brought to perspectives on ageing, the crisis of masculinity and, crucially, our digital condition. Soliman’s book prompts vital questions about the literary, cultural and social work the double can do.»(Patrick ffrench, Professor of French, King’s College London)«Alia Soliman’s book focuses on aspects of the female double, the doppelgänger in Latin American literature, contemporary photography and in social media, making relevant contributions to scholarship. Considering the growing importance of the digital double and the implications of public image and self-perception, this publication presents an interesting link from the motif’s literary past to its multi-mediated present.»(Gerald Bär, Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies, Universidade Aberta, Lisbon)«From the female double to digital doppelgänger trends, this book offers a topical investigation into issues pertaining to identity formation through the lens of the double. Emanating from the literary realm and into photography, film, and new media, the study reveals new and exciting engagements with the doppelgänger that span feminist, visual, and digital studies.»(Prof. Umberto Mondini, President, International Centre for Studies of Arts and Humanities, Rome) The book examines the doppelgänger persona’s gradual shift to representations of the self as simulacrum and responds to changing conceptions of identity that celebrate the potentiality of alterity. Varied literary, visual, and digital narratives of the self showcase the doppelgänger as an increasingly image-based construction. The increasing visuality of the doppelgänger corpus engages with notions of exteriorisation, fragmentation, and the materialisation of unfulfilled possibilities, reflecting a sense of self that indulges in multiple realities and alternative lives. The literature of Jorge Luis Borges and Carlos Fuentes reveal the birth of multiple selfhoods that are rooted in temporality; Willem Hermans, José Saramago, and Denis Villeneuve put forth under-represented experiences of alienation and the remedial powers of the alter; contemporary photographic campaigns by Cornelia Hediger and François Brunelle and digital doppelgänger series such as «twin strangers» lead trends in visual culture and new media where the encounter between self and double is constructive, performative, and interactive. Delineating a structural change, the book proposes a paradigm shift that celebrates the female double, multiplicity, and visual and digital engagement and furnishes the reader with an expanded conception of the doppelgänger figure.

To date, little research has been carried out on the complete theatrical works of Tristan Tzara, co-founder of the Dada movement. This volume provides the first comprehensive account of Tzara’s works for the stage. It addresses his distinct approach to theatre across his career and examines to what extent his dadaist and, latterly, surrealist principles are embodied in his stagecraft, both during and after his relations with these groups. This book uncovers the implications for subsequent theatre and performance practices in light of Tzara’s innovations and shows how he anticipates certain tendencies that would become markers of invention in theatre history. Addressing the linguistic, dramaturgical, and philosophical aspects of his theatre, this study positions Tristan Tzara as a pioneering playwright.

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) was at the forefront of the aesthetic revolution that is the European Avant-Garde of the early twentieth century. In the accompanying memoir to his English translation of 'Seated Woman', Timothy Mathews gives a wide-ranging account of the ways Apollinaire interacted in his life and art with Symbolism, Cubism, Futurism and Orphism, and the subjective as well as social experiences involved in urban modernism. In its scattered but controlled composition and the multiplicity of its tones, Seated Woman, published posthumously in 1920, is a powerful counterpoint to the multi-faceted poetry for which Apollinaire is often better known. In playing the music of violence as well as the generosity that characterised the Great War, it is a story of its time, for our time and any time. Apollinaire's writing as a whole is a living testament to the extraordinary creative energy he both witnessed and produced, but also his understanding of its vulnerability to exploitation and decay. This book in turn seeks to honour that understanding, its persistent calls to the imagination, and the wit, vision and honesty that await readers of Apollinaire's unique voice. The book includes a memoir by Timothy Mathews in which he discusses 'Seated Woman' and his translation, as well as Apollinaire’s aesthetic generally and its crucial part in the development of European modernism. The book contains further texts in which Timothy Mathews responds to Apollinaire’s writing through translation, as well as critically and creatively. "A remarkable testimony to the ‘on-the-go-ness' of Apollinaire. Having plunged into his poems for years untold, I discovered this Seated Woman (My God, she is that and more) through Timothy Mathews’s rendering, I won’t just say 'translation' – this is a kind of miracle of wit, facetious wording, and over-the-top, beyond the pale Beingness. Think upon this, Picasso!" —Mary Ann Caws, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, English, and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York.