Scholarly Series – serie

“Translation as Innovation: Bridging the Sciences and the Humanities” was the theme of the second biennial conference coordinated through a partnership between the Center for Translation Studies at the University of Illinois and the Centre d’Études sur la Traduction at the University of Paris Denis-Diderot. The proceedings of that conference, collected here, examine the role of translation in the transmission of knowledge, particularly in the sciences, recognizing translation as a non-neutral activity and instead as an act that may enhance topic awareness or even generate debate.

The several essays that comprise Border Towns chase, worry, and trouble ideas about situation and reference. As a group, the essays’ topics—color, lycanthropy, African-Canadian history, cooking, public transit, etc.—make an unlikely field. But through all its pages the book traces and describes acts of situation; and— for all its werewolves, greengrocers, and paeans to miscegenation and migration—its interest is not in capturing but in “the shape of reference itself.” The title figure of the border town serves as a “beard” for the unassimilable. Border Towns—the book of essays—is perhaps, finally, a book about poetry. (“It often seems to me,” writes the author, “that one of the best uses to which prose can be put is describing poetry.”)

For the past half-century, John Barth has been recognized as our quintessential postmodernist and praised as one of the best writers “we have ever had” (New York Times Book Review). In this unique collection, thirty-six writers and critics look back at Barth’s career, providing a deeper understanding of his books as well as privileged glimpses into the man behind the books. John Barth: A Body of Words is a bit of a chimera: a tripartite hybrid of tributes and reminiscences from friends, colleagues, fellow writers, and former students; a sheaf of cutting-edge scholarly essays; and a triadic conclusion comprising a description of the Sheridan Libraries Barth Collection, a rare recording of a 1966 public reading by Barth, and a two-part radio interview with him. At once a Festschrift, an assemblage of academic essays written to honor a colleague, and a liber amico- rum, this volume provides Barth’s critics, students, and fans with an essential vade mecum to his life and works.

One of the most penetrating and sympathetic explorations ever undertaken by one writer into the mind of another, Prancing Novelist is far more than a simple tribute or work of research. In these pages--by turns instructive, mischievous, and even gossipy--Brigid Brophy seeks nothing less than a vindication of the eternal liveliness of fiction itself against the persistent rumors that it is dying or dead. Though serious in intent, Prancing Novelist is not only a monument to Firbank, but is also a delightful showcase for Brophy's own uproarious prose, not to mention her genius for telling good stories.

Writing the Sky: Observations and Essays on Dermot Healy is a comprehensive collection of critical essays, memoirs, poetry, and other writerly responses devoted to the life and work of the late Dermot Healy (1947– 2014). Healy was an accomplished poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright, and editor, and so these essays and observations address the entire range of his eclectic and exciting oeuvre. While paying due tribute to the memory of the man himself, the collection primarily seeks to establish a series of important critical perspec- tives through which Healy’s writings can be properly viewed and assessed. Contemporary writers and poets— including Colm Tóibín, Neil Jordan, Aidan Higgins, Alannah Hopkin, Kevin Barry, Annie Proulx, Michael Longley, Roddy Doyle, Tess Gallagher, Timothy O’Grady, Glenn Patterson, Patrick McCabe, and many others—of- fer creative reflections on Healy’s work, while literary critics provide a wide-ranging foundation for future Healy scholarship. In total, over forty contributors from more than a dozen countries provide insight into one of Ireland’s most powerful and unique literary voices. This collection is absolutely crucial for everyone interested in the work of Dermot Healy and for all devotees of Irish literature.

One afternoon in December 1992, in Tartu, Estonia, Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman reluctantly sat down to dictate his memoirs to Elena Pogosian, his assistant, over a pot of tea. It was to be the first of twelve dictation sessions during which the initial draft of Non-Memoirs was created. The sessions were spread out over that winter and into the spring of 1993--the last spring of Lotman's life. The result of the process is this book - a book of memories and recollections of a good part of 20th century, divided into seven sections. The five shorter sections concern themselves with a single anecdote or theme (lice on the front, an encounter with a hare, a "totally Bulgakovian" episode, a visit from the KGB, Tartu School politics); the two longer sections provide the narrative backbone of the memoirs, tending to treat the passage of time, rather than a single event (school and frontline life, the end of the war and postwar university life).

Stepping Off the Edge addresses the question of literary edges and endings in contemporaryworks of literature from France, the United States, Canada, and Latin America. The bookincludes discussion of works by nine different authors, including Anne Carson, Marie NDiaye,Paul Auster, and César Aira. It considers the way that specific texts identify and interrogatetextual boundaries, and also draw attention to questions of closure. Each of these texts alsoreflects on the way we experience and write about edges and endings in our lives.

"How does a novel accrue value? How do certain new and unknown authors and their works make their way from obscurity into the pantheon of the greats, or—at least—the firmament of the stars?" Minuit examines the role played by French publishing house Editions de Minuit in altering the conception of literary France, not once but twice. The history of Editions de Minuit is an integral part of the history of the literary field; in Minuit, Spalding's work captures many of the cultural dimensions of literary production and dissemination at the height of France’s post-war intellectual and literary effervescence, and again, in the more recent period, when Minuit became the vehicle for French literature’s ‘postmodern’ turn.

Monogamy elaborates an ideology of romance from extraordinary poems and songs, one by one. Poems and popular songs are still the main medium for preserving the rules of romance. Each chapter is a meditation on one of eight commonplaces about love: that it makes one monogamous, sentimental, vulnerable; that its force is immediate and transformative; or that it is a fickle force, but cannot be bought, and yet endures. Strong poets and lyricists bend these notions, as lovers do too. Great poems and songs come from interstices between celebrated commonplaces, felt desires and second-thoughts. The Book of Love is heterogeneous, complicated. Some love poems reach significant numbers through books and anthologies, and eventually classroom textbooks, and are held in memory by generations of admirers. Many popular songs, however, have reached extremely large audiences, beginning with Broadway musicals, and continuing in the recordings of later jazz vocalists. They are not read, but they are firmly lodged in memory. They are the only poems known by most audiences. Canonical poems are imitated by aspiring poets and versifiers. The actual verse culture is layered with light verse, song lyrics, and Shakespeare’s sonnets. To understand what poems effectively teach—about romance, in particular—one should attend closely to songs too, particularly in the U.S. since 1920.

A rumination on authority and its limitations, about what we think we know - and the spaces in between. In Confessions of Narcissus, Scully suggests that our demand for narrative coherence is one of the things that makes our lives so difficult to bear, that when William Hazlitt declared, "It is we who are Hamlet", he was telling us something about Shakespeare’s universality that is worth considering: Hamlet does not just give voice to our own fears and anxieties, he also calls them into being. In the process of trying to find cures for ourselves, that is to say, we become creators, to some extent, of our own misfortunes. Confessions of Narcissus builds from the idea that stories are what we require and also (partly) what we suffer from. In this series of observations and aphorisms about literature and life, Scully makes the case that uncertainty isn't an ailment that we should necessarily try to overcome. Following in the tradition of Keats and others, uncertainty may be something that we have good cause to be more curious about, that uncertainty has artistic merit and is a state of being that we might even come to enjoy.