Daniel Punday, Writing at the Limit: The Novel in the New Media Ecology
reviewed by Mélissa Mahi
We live in a time that is more saturated by information than any time before in history. That information is no longer limited to text, but arises out of multiple media. The convergence of audio, video and text in digital culture challenges the traditional role of the written word as society’s primary source of knowledge production. In Writing at the Limit, Daniel Punday introduces us to authors who are ‘eager to understand what makes the traditional novel distinctive among storytelling... [read more]
Jack Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre
reviewed by Belinda Webb-Blofeld
Those already familiar with Jack Zipes will know his seminal scholarly work, Fairytales and the Art of Subversion (Wildman, 1983), of which 2013 marks 30 years since publication. The only problem with creating a groundbreaking work is how to ensure that subsequent works live up to the standard of the earlier success. In The Irresistible Fairy Tale, Zipes sets out to 'demonstrate that the historical evolution of storytelling reflects struggles of human beings worldwide to adapt to their changing... [read more]
Peter Hallward & Knox Peden (eds.), Concept & Form, Volume One: Key Texts from the Cahiers pour l’Analyse
reviewed by Matt Ellison
The essays collected in Concept and Form, Volume One, many of them appearing for the first time in English, mark the most fruitful period in 20th century French intellectual history. The Cahiers pour l’Analyse was a journal founded in 1966 and edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, Jean-Claude Milner, Alain Grosrichard and François Regnault, a group of Louis Althusser’s former students at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris. The journal continued Althusser’s philosophical and... [read more]
Ivy Turrow’s debut novel Saying Goodbye to Verena tells the story of Stella, a young woman, who upon declaring herself an economically unviable entity, decides to take her own life and leave all her possessions to her closest friend Verena. The entire book is an account of the two friends' final conversation in which Stella gives her detailed, and somewhat analytical, rationale for her morbid decision. While discussing the reasoning behind her suicide, Stella invokes a multitude of economic,... [read more]
The French writer Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) is best known for his play Ubu Roi, staged in 1896. The play managed to upset almost everyone who saw it, thereby securing a lasting legacy; recently revisited by Tom Jenks and Chris McCabe’s adaptation, Ubu Boris. His life appears to have been a string of anecdotes, many involving guns and pregnant women. A list of those he influenced would be terrifyingly imposing; suffice to say that a major web-archive of the avant-garde is called Ubuweb.... [read more]
Benoît Peeters, trans. Andrew Brown, Derrida: A Biography
reviewed by Marc Farrant
There is something inherently strange, peculiar even, about the 'auto' in 'autobiography'. On the one hand, it implies the automatisation of the self, that one would act autonomously, as oneself, in the writing of oneself (from the Greek autos, 'self'). On the other hand, this action or acting-out would seem to take place automatically, im-mediately, without the mediation of others but also without the mediation of the self; since any act that is purely autonomous, purely an act of the self in... [read more]
Nicholas Royle’s First Novel is a cunning piece of metafiction which blurs the bounds between fact and fiction - a pedantically self-conscious take on the campus novel. Taking inspiration from Vladimir Nabokov’s campus novel-cum-murder mystery Pale Fire (GP Putnam’s Sons, 1962), Royle’s seventh novel follows a creative writing lecturer who may or may not like having sex in cars and who may or may not be a murderer.
The central protagonist, Paul Kinder, is the author of a failed... [read more]
Mike Gonzalez & Houman Barekat (eds.), Arms & the People: Popular Movements & the Military from the Paris Commune to the Arab Spring
reviewed by Ian Birchall
The British government is planning an elaborate and expensive commemoration of the First World War for its centenary next year. We shall doubtless hear a lot about what Wilfred Owen called ‘the pity of war’; we may be told that the war was a tragedy, and even a mistake. But I am prepared to wager a substantial sum that we shall hear very little about desertion, mutiny and the shooting of officers. So we should enthusiastically welcome this new book which offers an alternative history of... [read more]
John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain
reviewed by John Newsinger
According to John Darwin, even today there are still historians of the British Empire who ‘feel obliged to proclaim their moral revulsion against it, in case writing about empire might be thought to endorse it.’ There are still historians who consider it ‘de rigueur to insist that for them, empire was evil.’ And there are even some apparently who ‘like to convey the impression that writing against empire is an act of great courage, as if the supporters of the Empire were lying ‘in... [read more]
Paolo Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism
reviewed by Jemma Crew
In October 2010, the journalist Malcolm Gladwell claimed controversially that ‘The revolution will not be tweeted’, in response to an overwhelming wealth of commentary celebrating the ‘Facebook revolution’ and the perceived transformation of political activism through online social media. The role that sites such as Twitter have played has been so important to political activism that in 2009 the US State Department asked the site to postpone a planned maintenance closure, given how... [read more]
