Saturday, December 21, 2013

3 NEW TITLES RECENTLY RELEASED FROM LITTERARIA PRAGENSIA BOOKS

www.litterariapragensia.com

THE ORGAN-GRINDER'S MONKEY: CULTURE AFTER THE AVANT-GARDE
by LOUIS ARMAND
ISBN 978-80-7308-466-0 (paperback). 266pp.
Publication date: October 2013.
http://litterariapragensia.wordpress.com/2013/10/05/the-organ-grinders-monkey/

“Armand is unafraid to ask the most basic questions, to go beyond the zone in which most cultural discussions operate in order to ask what underlies our capacity for thought, for imaging, for communication. Time and again he takes his reader to the edge of what is thinkable, subjecting familiar concepts to stringent analysis and casting an original light on old debates.”–Derek Attridge

Theorising the “poetic turn” in cultural discourse from the 1950s to the present, The Organ Grinder’s Monkey examines the post-avant-garde condition mapped out in the work of an international roster of artists, writers, philosophers and film-makers, from Neo-Dada to the New Media, including Andy Warhol, Jean-Luc Godard, Cy Twombly, Jacques Derrida, Rosalind Krauss, Samuel Beckett, Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, Alain Badiou, Dusan Makavejev, Marjorie Perloff, Michael Dransfield, Charles Olson, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Veronique Vassiliou, Guy Debord, Joshua Cohen, Pierre Joris, Philippe Sollers, Karen Mac Cormack, Marshall McLuhan, Lukas Tomin, John Kinsella, and Vincent Farnsworth.

ALEPHBET: ESSAYS ON GHOST WRITING, NUTSHELLS & INFINITE SPACE
by DARREN TOFTS
ISBN 978-80-7308-479-0 (paperback) 142pp
Publication date: November 2013
http://litterariapragensia.wordpress.com/2013/11/19/alephbet/

Alephbet is a selection of essays on the uncanny prescience of the writer Jorge Luis Borges for the age of cyberspace and beyond. Darren Tofts explains how in the 1990s he turned his practice as a literary theorist towards media studies of the emergent internet and its remote time-spaces of interaction and presence at a distance. De rigueur at the time, the perception of similarities between the worlds of literature and cyberspace are here inflected with Borges’s profound and inscrutable influence. Looking back to this convergence of one form of textual alchemy with another, Tofts is startled by those moments when Borges’s fiction anticipated ways of understanding the ambience of the computer network, often creeping unknowingly into his writing to announce the other zones of social media that we now take for granted.

TEXT & WORK: THE MENARD CASE
eds. TOMAS KOBLIZEK, PETR KOTATKO & MARTIN POKORNY
ISBN 978-80-7308-483-7 (paperback) 200pp
Publication date: November 2013
http://litterariapragensia.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/work-text/

The influence and reputation of 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,' is easily comparable to the impact of groundbreaking theoretical texts. Numerous philosophers, aestheticians and theorists of literature, music, or visual arts have been induced by this short story by J.L. Borges to reconsider the status of the literary work of art, to rethink the relationship between work and text. The essays collected here move from analyses of the identity of the literary work of art, as it is explicitly established by Borges’s narrator, to arguments that simply employ the Menard case as an opportunity for discussing broader issues of literary studies and the philosophy of literature.

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