Photo credit: Christopher Myers

In early April, Drew Daniel spoke to Baltimore City Paper about his book, The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance (Fordham University Press) took from idea to reality. Here is what he said…

This is not another self-help book about depression. In fact, in The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance (Fordham University Press), Drew Daniel argues that the titular affliction is less an individual malady and more of a collective effect that we share with others. As an assistant professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, half of the collaboration-centric electronic duo Matmos, and a underground-culture essayist, Daniel knows a thing or two about audiences and how they’re affected. Read more

By Raymond Cummings
PUBLISHED: JUNE 12, 2013

Speakers: Niza Yanay, Ph.D., professor of sociology and anthropology at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, and Judith Butler, Ph.D., Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and the co-director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Sponsored by Fordham University Press.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013  | 7:30 p.m. | Fordham University | 12th-Floor Lounge/Corrigan Center, Lowenstein Center, Lincoln Center Campus

Contact: Fordham University Press (718) 817-4795

On Love: In the Muslim Tradition by Rusmir Mahmutcehajic, is a study of the Islamic faith, most specifically Sufism. In addition to being an astute scholarly collection, the book looks at the relationship between love and faith, knowledge and spirituality. Sufism is Islamic Mysticism, but the book is written in a language that is universal and simple to understand–like the language of love itself.

In Poets of Divine Love: The Rhetoric of Franciscan Spiritual Poetry, Alessandro Vettori examines the vernacular of a different faith–that of the pre-Renaissance Franciscans. The poets in this case are St. Francis of Assisi and Jacopone da Todi, two Franciscans writing in Umbria during the 13th century. The resulting poems form a backbone of vernacular Italian literary tradition, and establish an essential relationship between faith and love.

Switching gears completely, Love and Other Technologies: Retrofitting Eros for the Information Age takes a look at love through the lens of modern technology–what is love’s place in our contemporary plugged-in culture? Love, as Dominic Pettman sees it, is every society’s interpretation of self in relation to others. So in today’s world, is love just another form of technology? For Pettman, the articulation of love is a technique of belonging: a way of responding to the basic plurality of everyone’s identity, a process that becomes increasingly complex as the forms of mediated communication, from cell phone and text messaging to the mass media, multiply and mesh together. This book brings love from the romance-cloaked past firmly into the here and now.

Vist our website and receive a 20% discount on all books this Valentine’s Day!

Janus words in the language of dreams

Words with mutually contradictory meanings indicate how our minds cope with complexity.

When I heard on the radio one evening that Harvard professor Marjorie Garber was to speak at a local bookstore on her newly published book of essays, Loaded Words, I decided I had to jump onto the Red Line and go hear her.

She is a Shakespearean scholar – of the kind who can fold Alfred E. Neuman and Don Drap­er into an essay on the Bard.

One of her overarching themes in the book is that as individual words evolve, they remain “loaded” with the underlying metaphor of their original meaning. “Those hidden meanings,” she said at the bookstore, “can come back to haunt you.”

Walking back, to avoid climbing down

One of my takeaways from her talk was a tidbit on Sigmund Freud’s interest in what are often known as “Janus words,” words with mutually contradictory meanings. How does “oversight” mean both “supervision” and “neglect”? How can “sanction” mean both “to permit” and “to punish”?

Read more…

New York University
NYU Silver Center
Jurow Hall, 1st floor
100 Washington Square East
NYC

May 4-5,  9:30am-7:30pm

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Conference sponsored by Fordham University’s Comparative Literature Program, New York University’s Comparative Literature Department, Fordham University Press and the consortium of presses participating in the Modern Language Initiative. Funding generously provided by the Mellon-funded Modern Language Initiative and Fordham University Arts & Sciences Deans.

For information, visit www.modernlanguageinitiative.com

The Fiction That Fiction Is Fiction Is Fiction
by Joan Marans Dim

A friend once published a novel that detailed the struggles of a 15-year-old girl, her dysfunctional family, hysterical pregnancy, and doomed teen love affair. The story also revealed her struggle against emotional and physical violence and exposed a tormented family dynamic — a dynamic that was at best unpleasant, at worst demented. As one reviewer put it, the family was like a beautiful piece of fruit that, when bitten, was utterly rotten. The novel was, in fact, a thinly disguised — although embellished — tale of the author’s youth.

When the novel was published, her mother read it — experiencing at once pride in a daughter who published a novel and then revulsion at its content.

The reality my author friend (and many novelists) quickly realized is that the notion that fiction is fiction is often fiction. READ MORE

Joan Marans Dim, a New York City historian, is the co-author of New York’s Golden Age of Bridges with Antonio Masi.
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To read more on fiction, see our book: The Author-Cat: Clemens’s Life in Fiction  by Forrest G. Robinson

At the end of his long life, Samuel Clemens felt driven to write a truthful account of what he regarded as the flaws in his character and the errors of his ways. His attempt to tell the unvarnished truth about himself is preserved in nearly 250 autobiographical dictations. In order to encourage complete veracity, he decided from the outset that these would be published only posthumously.

Nevertheless, Clemens’s autobiography is singularly unrevealing. Author, Forrest G. Robinson, argues that, by contrast, it is in his fiction that Clemens most fully—if often inadvertently—reveals himself. He was, he confessed, like a cat who labors in vain to bury the waste that he has left behind. Robinson argues that he wrote out of an enduring need to come to terms with his remembered experiences—not to memorialize the past, but to transform it.

Self-styled “peripatetic writer,” Harvard Shakespearean, and culture critic Garber (The Use and Abuse of Literature) collects loosely connected but fascinating essays (about half of them previously published in journals and books) on a range of themes. No word is more loaded than “madness,” which she considers in its ’50s and ’60s expression and incarnation in Mad magazine and Mad Libs. She considers the significance of reading “in slow motion,” focusing on the words rather than on external contexts, and the cultural implications of Shakespeare astride the literary canon. She uses the occasion of Patti Smith winning a National Book Award (Garber was on the panel that selected her book Just Kids) to meditate on celebrity lives as mythologies (like celebrities, “whatever [the Olympian gods] did, they were always good copy”). And finally, she pleads for reinvigorating the humanities, which she sees as plagued by low self-esteem, through the fostering of collaboration, a new literary commitment, and a reduction of hyperspecialization and overinsulation within English departments. Scholarship cross-fertilized by a new engagement with the political world remains Garber’s vision. (June)

Reviewed on: 03/05/2012

LOADED WORDS
By Marjorie Garber
304 pages
9780823242054, paperback, $26.00
Pub date: June 1, 2012

A vigorous, revealing collection about the pleasures and revelations of close reading, whether it involves words, books, biographies or ideas.

Renowned scholar Garber (English/Harvard Univ.; The Use and Abuse of Literature, 2011, etc.) is a deep thinker who never has to look far for inspiration—life and literature are full of untapped mysteries, and the more you slow down, the more you see. She finds large-scale drama in the small, abstract or arcane, reveling in how ordinary words keep secrets, how exclusive words (like genius) become clichés, how a rare edition of Hamlet can conceal hidden agendas and how historic figures become advertising “brands.” An essay on the word mad forges a credible connection between Mad magazine, the TV show Mad Men, Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and that original mad man, Hamlet. Shakespeare recurs throughout the book; as she demonstrated in her massive guidebook Shakespeare After All (2004), he’s the lens through which Garber often sees the world. The same goes for the great critic F.O. Matthiessen, recalled here in a superb tribute focusing on how his background in Elizabethan studies prepared him to understand 19th-century American literature. The use of the phrase “honey trap” in newspaper accounts of Julian Assange’s rape trial leads to Winnie the Pooh and the possible anti-German bias of “hunny.” Tackling Coleridge’s “unfinished” poem “Kubla Khan,” Garber raises questions as to what it means for a work of art to be cut short. In a final essay, the author offers a stirring defense of the humanities as the division of the university that deliberately doesn’t solve problems; it wrestles with interpretations, not final answers.

The same goes for this intellectually generous and rewarding book. Like its many subjects, it repays the close attention it commands. —KIRKUS REVIEWS

In the next few months we will publishing Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics by Yvette Christiansë and I am reminded of the Contemporary American Fiction Class I took with Professor Jonathan Levin where I read Song of Solomon as a junior.

I unearthed my essay on Song of Solomon that I had long since forgotten. In it I stressed that Song of Solomon is a novel that stresses the importance that a traditional past has on a contemporary American. Morrison creates a novel that is filled with largely religious references that form a commentary on contemporary American society, which appears to be moving towards secularization. However, the main character, Milkman takes a journey that shows the reader that a contemporary individual cannot break with their religion any more than Milkman can break with his cultural and religious past because it is the past that completes him. Milkman takes a leap at the end of the novel in which he lives life to the fullest, because in that second between life and death, he is free. A beautiful and painful concept.

I think that Song of Solomon may be the only work I have read by Toni Morrison. There is a copy of Paradise sitting on a bookshelf. With our upcoming publication, I just might dust both off and immerse myself in the writings of Toni Morrison, with Professor Christiansë as my guide.

Katie Sweeney

Every season we look forward to the unique and quirky angles our authors take on great works of literature. From exploring the story of Lot’s wife leaving Sodom and Gomorrah to arguing that love is another form of technology. We at FUP believe that love is for the over-educated!

But what happens when love goes awry? When the very diction we use becomes explosive? With a cover that would make Mae West proud, literary and cultural critic Marjorie Garber invites readers to join her in a rigorous and exuberant exploration of language in Loaded Words.  What links the pieces included in this vibrant new collection is the author’s contention that all words are inescapably loaded—that is, highly charged, explosive, substantial, intoxicating, fruitful, and overbrimming—and that such loading is what makes language matter.

‘‘Would you like to take a walk?’’ may sound like an open question, but try it on (a) your dog, (b) a hothead in a bar, or (c) the person to whom you are about to propose marriage, and see how ‘‘loaded’’ this simple query can become.

Garber casts her keen eye on terms from knowledge, belief, madness, interruption, genius, and celebrity to humanities, general education, and academia. Included here are an array of stirring essays, from the title piece, with its demonstration of the importance of language to our thinking about the world; to the superb “Mad Lib,” on the concept of madness from Mad magazine to debates between Foucault and Derrida; to pieces on Shakespeare, “the most culturally loaded name of our time,” and the Renaissance.

What’s not to love? That you have to wait until April 2012 for Loaded Words to publish. I’ve included a sneak peek, but here are some Mad Libs to hold you over until then.

Staff Literature Picks

• Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics by Yvette Christianse (June 2012)
• Hidden: Reflections on Gay Life, AIDS, and Spiritual Desire by Richard Giannone (June 2012)
• Between Page & Screen: Remaking Literature Through Cinema and Cyberspace edited by Kiene Brillenburg Wurth (August 2012)