Shakespeare, Our Contemporary is a provocative, original study of the major plays of Shakespeare. More than that, it is one of the few critical works to have strongly influenced theatrical productions. Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz are among the many directors who have acknowledged their debt to Jan Kott, finding in his analogies between Shakespearean situations and those in modern life and drama the seeds of vital new stage conceptions. Shakespeare,...

This is a guide to the life and work of the French intellectual Georges Bataille, best known as the author of the celebrated erotic novel, The Story of the Eye. Benjamin Noys introduces Bataille as a writer out of step with the dominant intellectual trends of his day - surrealism and existentialism - and shows that it was his very marginality that accounted in large part for his subsequent importance for the post-structuralists and the counterculture,...

Born in Asheville, North Carolina, Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) was one of the most influential southern writers, widely considered to rival his contemporary, William Faulkner-who believed Wolfe to be one of the greatest talents of their generation. His novels- including Look Homeward, Angel (1929); Of Time and the River (1935); and the posthumously published The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940)-remain touchstones of U.S. literature. In...

"Esta es una historia parcial y muy simplificada de una idea lingüística. No se trata de una historia de la lingüística en el sentido clásico de la expresión, es decir, una historia que hace un recuento cronológico de lo que cada gramático o cada filósofo dijo sobre el lenguaje. Se trata más bien de la historia selectiva de una idea contada desde la perspectiva del siglo XXI. Me he tomado libertades extraordinarias para establecer la forma...

Mas que una mirada literaria sobre la obra de Pablo Neruda, este libro del critico e investigador Jaime Concha analiza la produccion del Premio Nobel en funcion de sus relaciones con el proceso historico de la sociedad chilena. En esta nueva vision, que continua y que supera sus estudios anteriores, el autor intenta un analisis historico-social de la obra nerudiana, enmarcandola entre los anos del nacimiento del poeta y del estallido de la guerra...

Charles Olson was an important force behind the raucous, explicit, jaunty style of much of twentieth-century poetry in America. This study makes a major contribution to our understanding of his life and work.

Paul Christensen draws upon a wide variety of source materials—from letters, unpublished essays, and fragments and sketches from the Olson Archives to the full range of Olson's published prose and poetry. Under Christensen's critical

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John Gregg is Assistant Professor of French at Indiana University, Bloomington. In this book, the first in English devoted exclusively to Maurice Blanchot, John Gregg examines the problematic interaction between the two forms of discourse, critical and fictional, that comprise this writer's hybrid oeuvre. The result is a lucid introduction to the thought of one of the most important figures on the French intellectual scene of the past half-century. Gregg...

Shakespeare as a Way of Life shows how reading Shakespeare helps us to live with epistemological weakness and even to practice this weakness, to make it a way of life. In a series of close readings, Kuzner shows how Hamlet, Lucrece, Othello, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, and Timon of Athens, impel us to grapple with basic uncertainties: how we can be free, whether the world is abundant, whether we have met the demands of love and social life....