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The book revives literary theory, which was popular at the end of the 20th century, with the purpose of showing how useful it is in the current century in opening the minds of students to the dangers of claiming to have a fixed identity. The book shows that in Western cultures identity is a construct that always sees individuals as lacking something (being fallen) that can be retrieved or gained at the expense of an Other, an adversary seen as standing in the way of identity fulfillment. The book shows the history of «fallenness» through an analysis of Melville's Billy Budd, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. It also shows ways to heal identity through an analysis of Toni Morrison's Beloved and Rudolfo Anaya's Tortuga.

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<P>Transcending arguments over the definition of fantasy literature, Rhetorics of Fantasy introduces a provocative new system of classification for the genre. Utilizing nearly two hundred examples of modern fantasy, author Farah Mendlesohn uses this system to explore how fiction writers construct their fantastic worlds. Mendlesohn posits four categories of fantasy—portal-quest, immersive, intrusion, and liminal—that arise out of the relationship of the protagonist to the fantasy world. Using these sets, Mendlesohn argues that the author's stylistic decisions are then shaped by the inescapably political demands of the category in which they choose to write. Each chapter covers at least twenty books in detail, ranging from nineteenth-century fantasy and horror to extensive coverage of some of the best books in the contemporary field. Offering a wide-ranging discussion and penetrating comparative analysis, Rhetorics of Fantasy will excite fans and provide a wealth of material for scholarly and classroom discussion.</P><P>Includes discussion of works by over 100 authors, including Lloyd Alexander, Peter Beagle, Marion Zimmer Bradley, John Crowley, Stephen R. Donaldson, Stephen King, C. S. Lewis, Gregory Maguire, Robin McKinley, China Miéville, Suniti Namjoshi, Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Sheri S. Tepper, J. R. R. Tolkien, Tad Williams</P>

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Begun in 1929 under the title «New Prose» and drastically revised after Vladimir Mayakovsky's sudden death, A Hunt for Optimism (1931) circles obsessively around a single scene of interrogation in which a writer is subjected to a show trial for his unorthodoxy. Using multiple perspectives, fragments, and aphorisms, and bearing the vulnerability of both the Russian Jewry and the anti-Bolshevik intelligentsia—who had unwittingly become the «enemies of the people»Hunt satirizes Soviet censorship and the ineptitude of Soviet leaders with acerbic panache. Despite criticism at the time that it lacked unity and was too «variegated» to be called a purely «Shklovskian book,» Hunt is stylistically unpredictable, experimentally bold, and unapologetically ironic—making it one of the finest books in Shklovsky's body of work.

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Now recognized as one of the giants of postwar American fiction, William Gaddis (1922–98) shunned the spotlight during his life, which makes this collection of his letters a revelation. Beginning in 1930 when Gaddis was at boarding-school and ending in September 1998, a few months before his death, these letters function as a kind of autobiography, and are all the more valuable because Gaddis was not an autobiographical writer. Here we see him forging his first novel The Recognitions (1955) while living in Mexico, fighting in a revolution in Costa Rica, and working in Spain, France, and North Africa. Over the next twenty years he struggles to find time to write the National Book Award-winning J R (1975) amid the complications of work and family; deals with divorce and disillusionment before reviving his career with Carpenter's Gothic (1985); then teaches himself enough about the law to indite A Frolic of His Own (1994), which earned him another NBA. Returning to a topic he first wrote about in the 1940s, he finishes his last novel Agape Agape as he lay dying.

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Shklovsky: Witness to an Era is a blend of riotous anecdote, personal history, and literary reflection, collecting interviews with Viktor Shklovsky conducted by scholar Serena Vitale in the '70s, toward the end of the great critic's life, and in the face of interference and even veiled threats of violence from the Soviet government. Shklovsky's answers are wonderfully intimate, focusing particularly on the years of the early Soviet avant-garde, and his relationships with such figures as Eisenstein and Mayakovsky. Bearing witness to a vanished age whose promise ended in despair, Shklovsky is in great form throughout, summing up a century of triumphs and disappointments, personal and historical.

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Taking Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Gerard Manley Hopkins as its primary subjects, Surface Tension reveals how these later Victorian poets repeatedly imagine the aesthetic moment—charged, variegated, intensely focused—as capable of birthing a new, and newly redemptive, culture. Turning to contemporary experimental poets and theorists of poetry, such as Andrew Joron, Lisa Robertson, Christopher Nealon, and Joan Retallack, it goes on to reveal how our own poetry's fascination with complex surfaces and imagined social transformation has deep and under-recognized ties to Victorian concepts. Surface Tension offers new insights into the debt we owe to the most radical of the Victorians while yielding new understandings of how late Victorian poetry, even when least explicitly political, engages, and often re-envisions, the period's pressing anxieties about social progress, decadence, and revolution.

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Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003), one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century French literature, produced a wide variety of essays and fictions that reflect on the complexities of literary work. His description of writing continually returns to a number of themes, such as solitude, passivity, indifference, anonymity, and absence—forces confronting the writer, but also the reader, the text itself, and the relations between the three. For Blanchot, literature involves a movement toward disappearance, where one risks the loss of self; but such a sacrifice, says Blanchot, is inherent in the act of writing. Approaching Disappearance explores the question of disappearance in Blanchot's critical work and then turns to five narratives that offer a unique reflection on the threat of disappearance and the demands of literature—work by Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Louis-René Des Forêts, and Nathalie Sarraute.

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Михаил Алексеевич Кузмин (1872, или, по его персональной мифологии, 1875–1936) – признанный русский поэт, один из самых необычных деятелей русского Серебряного века. Критическое наследие Кузмина – пример «блога» своего времени: отзывы на текущие события, обосновывающие ключевые теоретические положения. Чтение критики Кузмина учит обосновывать эстетические принципы, не сводя их ни к впечатлениям отдельных произведений, ни к отвлеченным умозаключениям. Авторский сборник «Условности» (1923), включивший в основном театральную критику и обзоры литературной жизни, снабжен подробными комментариями, реконструирующими контексты размышлений Кузмина.

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«Прогулки по Флоренции» Джона Рёскина – путеводитель по раннему Ренессансу во Флоренции и одновременно школа взгляда, обучение видеть несходное в повторяющемся и сходство в непохожем. Рёскин научил воспринимать Флоренцию динамично, перейдя от восторгов к анализу идей, вдохновлявших эпоху Возрождения. Флоренция Рёскина – знакомая незнакомка, приоткрывающая тайны лишь тем, кто знает и тайну интеллектуального наслаждения, и тайну доверчивой беседы. Переиздание известной книги снабжено новым предисловием, раскрывающим место книги Рёскина в истории комплексного изучения искусства.

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В русскоязычном секторе Интернета длительное время длится яростная полемика между сторонниками НАСА и скептиками России. Одной из самых любимых тем, которая вызывает яростные споры между фанатиками американского «лунного достижения» и скептиками, является тема «Цвет Луны и лунный грунт США». Американские фальсификаторы допустили много ошибок при демонстрации «лунной поверхности в своем шоу „Аполлон“». Эта книга разоблачает мифы о лунном грунте и цвете Луны.

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