Friday, April 30, 2010

THEORY AFTER THEORY now available for pre-order

It may not be my 'magnum opus' (as one of my colleagues graciously referred to it) but it has been three years in the making, and it does set out my views on a number of subjects, most notably the challenging and poorly understood realm of recent literary theory.

Theory After Theory, with a beautiful  cover, is now available for pre-order from the splendid Broadview Press; the actual book should be physically available in a month.

It can also be ordered from Amazon.

I take particular pleasure in this book as it is a subject I have taught so much, and it exemplifies a real relation between my teaching and my research.

Sorry to only be blogging about my own books recently, but I am a minimal blogger; that is just the way it is :)

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Polish tragedy

Though it seems somewhat mechanical to blog after every catastrophic event--the victims of the West Virginia mine disaster and the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes solicit, in their pain and loss,  blog entries just as much--the plane crash in which President Kaczynski of Poland and many others were killed is particularly awful because they were about to participate in an act of reconciliation with respect to the slaughter perpetrated by the Soviets at Katyn. As I dealt with the consequences of the Katyn massacre in my Anthony Powell book (t=due to Powell's references to the event in his fiction), and learned about the continuing trauma felt by Poles in its aftermath, this plane crash is devastatingly sad as it occurred just as some painful memories from the past were about to be at least partially healed.

This article (in German) puts the complicated skein of history and tragedy in context.