Presences

Renowned scholar George Steiner explores the power and presence of the unseen in art. “It takes someone of [his] stature to tackle this theme head-on” (The New York Times). There is a philosophical school of thought that believes the presence of God in art, literature, and music—in creativity in general—is a vacant metaphor, an eroded figure of speech, a ghost in humanity’s common parlance. George Steiner posits the opposite—that any coherent understanding of language and art, any capacity to communicate meaning and feeling, is premised on God. In doing so, he argues against the kind of criticism that obscures, instead of elucidates, meaning. From the power of language to vital philosophical tenets, Real Presences examines the role of meaning and of the spiritual in art throughout history and across cultures.

First published in 1976, this beautiful, interactive collaboration is a unique work of book art in which Marisol's monumental pop-art sculptures face the blocks of Creeley's prose poems. The new introduction by Creeley scholar Stephen Fredman describes how the poet's autobiographical prose poetry arose in conversation with images of Marisol's equally autobiographical sculptures. In addition to the introduction, this edition features an appendix of newly discovered material, much of it found in Creeley's own copy of the original edition of Presences. These include postcards and letters from Marisol, designer William Katz (who brought the poet and artist together), Mexican poet Octavio Paz, and several university professors. The material in the appendix allows the editor to reveal the genesis of Presences as a collaborative work of art involving three creators: artist, designer, and poet.

This volume discusses the question of presence and/or absence from a transdisciplinary perspective, and intends to provide insights into how a wide range of disciplines addresses this issue which has been at the centre of philosophical, theoretical and critical debates in the past decades. As the essays in the volume prove, apparently diverse areas can have a lot in common and talk to each other in sometimes surprising ways. The topics discussed include modals in various languages and black slave funeral sermons, pragmatic markers and the Australian Stolen Generation, the transcendental in poems by Ann Bradstreet, Arthur Symons and Philip Larkin, short stories by Katherine Mansfield, generic presences in Virginia Woolf and contemporary journalism, haunting presences in fin-de-siècle ghost stories and in a contemporary horror film, mythical structures in John Cowper Powys and Margaret Atwood, and gender politics in Pat Barker and Sarah Waters. The analyses, as they talk to each other, create multiple dialogues without imposing closures and ultimate interpretations on the plethora of possible meanings emerging from the juxtaposition of these essays. This transdisciplinary volume, written in an erudite but reader-friendly language, will be of great interest to both the academic world, as well as a broader readership interested in how linguistic phenomena in general, cultural myths of all kinds, various cinematic, literary and journalistic genres from diverse periods can be approached and opened up to new readings and meanings from the perspective of presences and absences.

Essays discussing the meaning of Christ's presence.

This book explores changes and continuations in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer lives, identities and spatial practices in the 21st century from around the globe, using a range of methods to connect pasts, places and policies with contemporary times, linking individual and social presences (and absences) affectively and materially.

This collection of essays explores aspects of the reception of ancient Rome in a number of European countries from the late eighteenth century to the end of the Second World War. Rome has been made to stand for literary authority, republican heroism, imperial power and decline, the Catholic Church, the pleasure of ruins. The studies offered here examine some of the sometimes strange and unexpected places where Roman presences have manifested themselves during this period. Scholars from several disciplines, including English literature and history of art, as well as classics, bring to bear a variety of approaches on a wide range of images and texts, from statues of Napoleon to Freud's analysis of dreams. Rome's seemingly boundless capacity for multiple, indeed conflicting, signification has made it an extraordinarily fertile paradigm for making sense of - and also for destabilizing - history, politics, identity, memory and desire.

The Berlin Sound Archive (Lautarchiv) consists of an extensive collection of sound recordings, compiled for scientific purposes in the first half of the 20th century. Recorded on shellac are stories and songs, personal testimonies and poems, glossaries and numbers. This book engages with the archive by consistently focusing on recordings produced under colonial conditions. With a firm commitment to postcolonial scholarship, Absent Presences in the Colonial Archive is a historical ethnography of a metropolitan institution that participated in the production and preservation of colonial structures of power and knowledge. The book examines sound objects and listening practices that render the coloniality of knowledge fragile and inconsistent, revealing the absent presences of colonial subjects who are given little or no place in established national narratives and collective memories.

Concerned with the intermingled thematic and formal preoccupations of Romantic thought and literary practice in works by twentieth-century British, Irish, and American artists, this collection examines the complicated legacy of Romanticism in twentieth-century novels, poetry, and film. Even as key twentieth-century cultural movements have tried to subvert or debunk Romantic narratives of redemptive nature, individualism, perfectibility, and the transcendence of art, the forms and modes of feeling associated with the Romantic period continue to exert a signal influence on the modern moment - both as a source of tension and as creative stimulus. As the essays here show, the exact meaning of the Romantic bequest may be bitterly contested, but it has been difficult to leave behind. The contributors take up a wide range of authors, including Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, W. H. Auden, Doris Lessing, Seamus Heaney, Hart Crane, William Faulkner, Don DeLillo, and Jonathan Franzen. What emerges from this lively volume is a fuller picture of the persistence and variety of the Romantic period's influence on the twentieth-century.