Download or read book Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams written by Mark Ford and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Raymond Roussel, one of the most outlandishly compelling literary figures of modern times, died in mysterious circumstances at the age of fifty-six in 1933. The story Mark Ford tells about Roussel's life and work is at once captivating, heartbreaking, and almost beyond belief. Could even Proust or Nabokov have invented a character as strange and memorable as the exquisite dandy and graphomaniac this book brings to life? Roussel's poetry, novels, and plays influenced the work of many well-known writers and artists: Jean Cocteau found in him "genius in its pure state," while Salvador Dalí, who died with a copy of Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique on his bedside table, believed him to be one of France's greatest writers ever. Edmond Rostand, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Michel Foucault, and Alain Robbe-Grillet all testified to the power of his unique imagination. By any standards, Roussel led an extraordinary life. Tremendously wealthy, he took two world tours during which he hardly left his hotel rooms. He never wore his clothes more than twice, and generally avoided conversation because he dreaded that it might turn morbid. Ford, himself a poet, traces the evolution of Roussel's bizarre compositional methods and describes the idiosyncrasies of a life structured as obsessively as Roussel structured his writing.
Download or read book Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams written by Mark Ford and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roussel's poetry, novels and plays have had a huge influence on the work of many of the 20th century's writers. This account of Roussel's life and oeuvre traces the evolution of his bizarre compositional methods, and shows the idiosyncracies of his life.
Download or read book Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams written by Mark Ford and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compulsive writer and exquisite dandy Raymond Roussel was one of the most extraordinary literary figures of all time. He was born in 1877 and died in mysterious circumstances in 1933; his life was as strange as his work. His bizarre poetry, novels and plays - all disastrous commercial flops - have had a monumental influence on many of the century's best-known writers and artists. Jean Cocteau declared him 'genius in its pure state,' while Salvador Dali died with one of his books on his bedside table. Marcel Duchamp, Andreacute; Breton, Michel Foucault, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Harry Mathews have all testified to the haunting power of Roussel's imagination. The poet Mark Ford traces the evolution of Roussel's eccentric compositional methods, and describes the idiosyncrasies of a life that was at once enchanting, heart-breaking and scarcely credible.
Download or read book Impressions of Africa written by Raymond Roussel and published by Calder Publications. This book was released on 2018-12-18 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first of Roussel's two major prose works, Impressions of Africa is not, as the title may suggest, a conventional travel account, but an adventure story put together in a highly individual fashion and with an unusual time sequence, whereby the reader is even made to choose whether to begin with the first or the tenth chapter. A veritable literary melting pot, Roussel's groundbreaking text makes ample use of wordplay and the surrealist techniques of automatic writing and private allusion.
Download or read book New Impressions of Africa written by Raymond Roussel and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-28 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new translation of a masterpiece of modernist poetry Poet, novelist, playwright, and chess enthusiast, Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) was one of the French belle époque's most compelling literary figures. During his lifetime, Roussel's work was vociferously championed by the surrealists, but never achieved the widespread acclaim for which he yearned. New Impressions of Africa is undoubtedly Roussel's most extraordinary work. Since its publication in 1932, this weird and wonderful poem has slowly gained cult status, and its admirers have included Salvador Dalì—who dubbed it the most "ungraspably poetic" work of the era—André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, Michel Foucault, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery. Roussel began writing New Impressions of Africa in 1915 while serving in the French Army during the First World War and it took him seventeen years to complete. "It is hard to believe the immense amount of time composition of this kind of verse requires," he later commented. Mysterious, unnerving, hilarious, haunting, both rigorously logical and dizzyingly sublime, it is truly one of the hidden masterpieces of twentieth-century modernism. This bilingual edition of New Impressions of Africa presents the original French text and the English poet Mark Ford's lucid, idiomatic translation on facing pages. It also includes an introduction outlining the poem's peculiar structure and evolution, notes explaining its literary and historical references, and the fifty-nine illustrations anonymously commissioned by Roussel, via a detective agency, from Henri-A. Zo.
Download or read book How I Wrote Certain of My Books written by Raymond Roussel and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction by John Ashberry The most eccentric writer of the twentieth century. His unearthly style fascinated Surrealists such as Breton, Duchamp and Cocteau but also Gide, Robespierre, Foucault and John Ashberry. The title essay is the key to Roussel's methods and is joined by selections from his major fiction, drama, and poetry pieces superbly translated by his New York School admirers, which include Ashberry, Winkfield, Harry Matthews and Kenneth Koch.
Download or read book Locus Solus written by Raymond Roussel and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intoxicating sui generis novel by “the greatest mesmerist of modern times” (André Breton) The wealthy scientist Martial Canterel guides a group of visitors through his expansive estate, Locus Solus, where he displays his various deranged inventions, each more spectacular than the last. First, he introduces a machine propelled by the weather, which constructs a mosaic out of varying hues of human teeth, then shows a hairless cat charged with a powerful electric battery, and next a bizarre theater in which corpses are reanimated with a special serum to enact the most important movements of their past lives. Wondrously imaginative and narrated with Roussel’s deadpan wit, Locus Solus is unlike anything else ever written.
Download or read book A Wave of Dreams written by Aragon and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first time Aragon's seminal French surrealist text has been published in English as a single volume and the translation is accompanied by a CD of eight spoken extracts set to music by Tymon Dogg and Alex Thomas. Aragon's extraordinary prose-poem-essay A Wave of Dreams (Une vague de reves), is a compelling, lyrical, first-hand account of the early days of surrealist experimentation in Paris. Writing in 1924, Aragon vividly describes, and philosophically evaluates, the inner adventures, the hallucinations and encounters with the 'Marvellous' which took the young surrealists to the brink of insanity as a revolutionary new era in Art History was born."
Download or read book The Alley of Fireflies and Other Stories written by Raymond Roussel and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction. Short Stories. Translated from the French by Mark Ford. Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) is one of the most distinctive and compelling French writers of the twentieth century, yet many aspects of Roussel's life remain shrouded in mystery. An extremely wealthy and always exquisitely dressed homosexual dandy, Roussel was also a compulsive writer. Despite the strangeness of his work, he was convinced that it would make him as popular as Victor Hugo or Shakespeare. His suicide at the age of 56 was in part prompted by the continual disappointment of his hopes for fame. The full extent of Roussel's writing only became clear in 1989 when a trunk was unearthed in a furniture warehouse containing a vast trove of his manuscripts. The most exciting discoveries were the full draft of Locus Solus (over twice as long as the published version) and the typescript of what would have been his third novel, THE ALLEY OF FIREFLIES, which is translated here for the first time into English by the leading Roussel scholar, Mark Ford. Ford has also translated two haunting extracts from the drafts of Locus Solus, and versions of two of the young Roussel's most intriguing short stories, Chiquenaude and AMONG THE BLACKS. Roussel's work was vociferously championed by Surrealist writers and painters such as André Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dalì, and later proved a significant influence on Oulipians (particularly Georges Perec), on nouveaux romanciers like Alain Robbe-Grillet, as well as on John Ashbery and Harry Mathews, who named their pioneering magazine of the 1960s Locus Solus, after Roussel's second novel.
Download or read book Blood in the City written by Richard D. E. Burton and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Terror of 1793-94, the Paris Commune of 1871, the Dreyfus Affair—explosions of violence punctuated French history from the start of the Revolution until the Liberation at the close of World War II. The distinguished scholar Richard D. E. Burton here offers a stunningly original account of these outbursts, concluding that recourse to political violence was not occasional and abnormal, but rather the usual pattern, in French history. Instead of adhering to conventional chronological lines, Blood in the City is structured topologically around a number of major Parisian "sites of memory," including Place de la Concorde, Sacré Coeur, and the Eiffel Tower. For thirty years Burton has visited and revisited Paris, criss-crossing the streets on foot, and lived with great nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary depictions of the city. Drawing on historical, literary, visual, anthropological, and psychological sources, he develops a wide-ranging account of violence in modern French politics. In so doing, he provides powerful insights into political violence, scapegoating, the idea of sacrifice, and the widespread French obsession with conspiracy. Burton demonstrates that time and again the same basic scenario has been acted out on the streets of Paris: one or more people would be singled out from the community and imprisoned, exiled, or, more often, subjected to violence by the crowd or the state. In particular, he explores how Catholicism—in its extreme, ultrareactionary form—shaped the worldviews of Parisians and how the killing of a sacrificial victim came to be seen as a reenactment of the crucifixion of Christ.
Download or read book Soft Sift written by Mark Ford and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 51 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soft Sift is Mark Ford's first collection since the widely praised Landlocked was published in 1992. Barbara Everett has remarked of his recent work: 'Mark Ford's poems are so cool that it's mystifying they aren't cold. But they aren't: they are friendly, touching and very funny. His work exhibits an enormous casual elegance of mind and style, producing work that is witty without pose, refined and subtle without evasiveness.' There are curved stories here, intrigues and quests whose exuberance of plot and sense of quizzical or farcical immersion in the world of appearances is rendered with a light tough and a sure command of tone, staging the conflict between the mind's drift and the 'inflexible etiquette' of form (Gerard Manley Hopkins's 'soft sift / In an hourglass'). The making of these condensed dramas is often the unmaking of the person speaking, whose 'frets and fresh starts' reveal an original sensibility concerned not with self-display but with a general comedy of wrong moves. Mark Ford has been compared to an American Philip Larkin, or an English John Ashbery, but his poetry is in fact, as John Bayley has remarked 'wholly sui generis'.
Download or read book Life a User s Manual written by Georges Perec and published by Collins Harvill Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in a Paris apartment block, this novel describes in minute detail the lives of the inhabitants and the apartments they inhabit at a specific moment in time.
Download or read book Surrealist Games written by Alastair Brotchie and published by Shambhala. This book was released on 1993 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Surrealist movement that arose in Europe in the early 1900s used playful procedures and systematic stratagems to create provocative works and challenge the conventions of art, literature, and society. They conducted their experiments through art and polemic, manifesto and demonstration, love and politics. But it was above all through game-playing that they sought to subvert academic modes of inquiry and undermine the complacent certainties of the bourgeoisie. Surrealist games is a delightful compendium that allows the reader to enjoy firsthand the methodologies of the Surreal, with their amazing swings between the verbal and the visual, the beautiful and the grotesque. It is also a box of games to play for fun: poetic, imaginative, revelatory, full of possibilities for unlocking the door to the unconscious and releasing the poetry of collective creativity. The boxed set contains: * A 168-page sewn, illustrated hardcover book packed with outrageous language games, alternative card games, "Dream Lotto," and automatic techniques for making poems, stories, collages, photomontages, and candle-smoke drawings. The illustrations are by such artists as Max Ernst, Hans Arp, and Tristan Tzara * A fold-out game board for the "Goose Game," designed by Andr� Breton, Yves Tanguy, and others * A Little Surrealist Dictionary
Download or read book The Vorrh written by Brian Catling and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-04-28 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prepare to lose yourself in the heady, mythical expanse of The Vorrh, a daring debut that Alan Moore has called “a phosphorescent masterpiece” and “the current century's first landmark work of fantasy.” Next to the colonial town of Essenwald sits the Vorrh, a vast—perhaps endless—forest. It is a place of demons and angels, of warriors and priests. Sentient and magical, the Vorrh bends time and wipes memory. Legend has it that the Garden of Eden still exists at its heart. Now, a renegade English soldier aims to be the first human to traverse its expanse. Armed with only a strange bow, he begins his journey, but some fear the consequences of his mission, and a native marksman has been chosen to stop him. Around them swirl a remarkable cast of characters, including a Cyclops raised by robots and a young girl with tragic curiosity, as well as historical figures, such as writer Raymond Roussel and photographer and Edward Muybridge. While fact and fictional blend, and the hunter will become the hunted, and everyone’s fate hangs in the balance, under the will of the Vorrh.
Download or read book Magritte written by Alex Danchev and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major biography of the pathbreaking, perpetually influential surrealist artist and iconoclast whose inspiration can be seen in everyone from Jasper Johns to Beyoncé—by the celebrated biographer of Cézanne and Braque In this thought-provoking life of René Magritte (1898-1967), Alex Danchev makes a compelling case for Magritte as the single most significant purveyor of images to the modern world. Magritte’s surreal sensibility, deadpan melodrama, and fine-tuned outrageousness have become an inescapable part of our visual landscape, through such legendary works as The Treachery of Images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe) and his celebrated iterations of Man in a Bowler Hat. Danchev explores the path of this highly unconventional artist from his middle-class Belgian beginnings to the years during which he led a small, brilliant band of surrealists (and famously clashed with André Breton) to his first major retrospective, which traveled to the United States in 1965 and gave rise to his international reputation. Using 50 color images and more than 160 black-and-white illustrations, Danchev delves deeply into Magritte’s artistic development and the profound questions he raised in his work about the very nature of authenticity. This is a vital biography for our time that plumbs the mystery of an iconoclast whose influence can be seen in everyone from Jasper Johns to Beyoncé.
Download or read book The Practice of Everyday Life written by Michel de Certeau and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michel de Certeau considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior are put by individuals and groups, describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture. In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws on an immense theoretical literature in analytic philosophy, linguistics, sociology, semiology, and anthropology--to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature.
Download or read book Other Traditions written by John Ashbery and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2001-12-01 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the greatest living poets in English here explores the work of six writers he often finds himself reading "in order to get started" when writing, poets he turns to as "a poetic jump-start for times when the batteries have run down." Among those whom John Ashbery reads at such times are John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert. Less familiar than some, under Ashbery's scrutiny these poets emerge as the powerful but private and somewhat wild voices whose eccentricity has kept them from the mainstream--and whose vision merits Ashbery's efforts, and our own, to read them well. Deeply interesting in themselves, Ashbery's reflections on these poets of "another tradition" are equally intriguing for what they tell us about Ashbery's own way of reading, writing, and thinking. With its indirect clues to his work and its generous and infectious appreciation of a remarkable group of poets, this book conveys the passion, delight, curiosity, and insight that underlie the art and craft of poetry for writer and reader alike. Even as it invites us to discover the work of poets in Ashbery's other tradition, it reminds us of Ashbery's essential place in our own.
