Prose Of The World

The work which this author planned to call The Prose of the World, or Introduction to the Prose of the World, is unfinished. There is good reason to believe that he deliberately abandoned it and that, he had lived, he would not have completed it, at least in the form that he first outlined. Once finished, the book was to constitute the first section of a two-part work--the second would have had a more distinct metaphysical nature--whose aim was to offer us, as an extension of the Phenomenology of Perception, a theory of truth.

'Prose of the World' explores the global life of the banality of Empire. From late-colonial modernism to the present day, he looks at writers from all over the world to expose the everyday life of those abroad.

Present Imperfect asks how South African writers have responded to the end of apartheid, to the hopes that attended the birth of the 'new' nation in 1994, and to the inevitable disappointments that have followed. The first full-length study of affect in South Africa's literature, it understands 'disappointment' both as a description of bad feeling and as naming a missed appointment with all that was promised by the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid Struggle (a dis-appointment). Attending to contemporary writers' treatment of temporality, genre, and form, it considers a range of negative feelings that are also experiences of temporal disjuncture-including stasis, impasse, boredom, disaffection, and nostalgia. Present Imperfect offers close readings of work by a range of writers - some known to international Anglophone readers including J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavic, and Zoë Wicomb, some slightly less well-known including Afrikaans-language novelists Marlene van Niekerk and Ingrid Winterbach, and others from a new generation including Songeziwe Mahlangu and Masande Ntshanga. It addresses key questions in South African studies about the evolving character of the historical period in which the country now finds itself. It is also alert to wider critical and theoretical conversations, looking outward to make a case for the place of South African writing in global conversations, and mobilizing readings of writing marked in various ways as 'South African' in order to complicate the contours of World Literature as category, discipline, and pedagogy. It is thus also a book about the discontents of neoliberalism, the political energies of reading, and the fates of literature in our troubled present.

In this collection, winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, Charles Simic puns, pulls pranks. He can be jazzy and streetwise. Or cloak himself in antiquity. Simic has new eyes, and in these wonderful poems and poems-in-prose he lets the reader see through them.

“The most terrible disaster that one group of human beings can inflict on another is war. Wars cause misery on an indescribable scale. Yet we go on doing it to one another, generation after generation. Why? Warfare is a recurrent and universal characteristic of human existence. The mythologies of practically all peoples abound in wars and the superhuman deeds of warriors, and pre-literate communities apparently delighted in the recital of stories about battles. Since our species became literate a mere 5,000 years ago, written history has mostly been the history of wars. Thousands who knew war evidently sickened of it and dreamt of lasting peace, expressing their vision in literature and art, in philosophy and religion. They imagined Utopias freed of martial ambition and bloodshed which harked back to the Golden Age of classical antiquity, to the Christian vision of a paradise lost, and to the Arcadia of Greek and Latin poetry, so richly celebrated in the canvases of Claude and Poussin. All these things bear eloquent testimony to the human longing for peace, but they have not triumphed over our dreadfully powerful propensity to war.” —from the Introduction by Anthony Stevens In this multi-disciplinary collection of essays on the manifestations of war in poetry, fiction, drama, music and documentaries, scholars and practitioners from an international context describe the transformation of the war experience into chronicles of hope and despair, from Herodotus up to the present day.