Month: October 2016

Can one consider hatred to be beautiful? The title of the book does not seek to justify such an ugly passion, but rather to explore the most extreme hatred, the type of pure hatred that does not need political, economic, or psychological motivation for mass killings and destruction. Such self-sufficient hatred can be better grasped …

The aim of Le Sublime et le grotesque is to pinpoint those moments in literary and artistic history when grotesque horror turns into sublime terror, when sublime rapture is spurred by grotesque grimaces. Such investigation spans broadly from Sophocles and Pseudo-Longinus to Amélie Nothomb, and Slavoj Žižek. It involves major authors from French, English and German …

Baudelaire and Flaubert were both attracted to the question of the shapeless and the aesthetic challenges it raises. In more ways than one, the poem “Une charogne”, as well as the misadventures of Bouvard and Pécuchet, faced with putrescent matter, fall within the aesthetics of disgust. The shapeless and putrefaction also serve as a springboard …

Dante and the Dynamics of Textual Exchange is the first book-length study to explore the question of poetry and genre in Dante’s Vita Nova (ca. 1292–1294). In paying particular attention to complex and multifaceted interactions between different cultures in Italy in the thirteenth century, this study illuminates the multicultural and plurilinguistic society transitioning from the feudal …

What did the past sound like, taste like, smell like? How did it look and feel? How did people make sense of the world through their senses? These are questions which are increasingly capturing the interest of historians. A Cultural History of the Senses delves into the sensory foundations of Western civilization, taking a comprehensive period-by-period …

Through close readings of novels by Olivier Rolin, Marie Darrieussecq,  Michel Houellebecq, Chloé Delaume, Lydie Salvayre, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Virginie Despentes, Philippe Vasset, and Jean Rolin, this book seeks to answer the following questions: How do we make sense of and meaningfully map our place within the world-system of accelerated globalization? What forces make this difficult, …

This collection of poems, written by Ernesto Livorni while he was a PhD student in the 1980s, was recently translated into English by Jason Laine.