Ferne Kontinente und fremde Lander bilden die Kulisse fur die drei bislang erschienenen Romane Walter Abishs. Da der Autor weder Afrika, Deutschland noch Mexiko vor der Veroffentlichung der Romane jemals besucht hatte, kann eine topographisch-realistische Darstellung nicht seine Hauptabsicht gewesen sein. Im Gegenteil: A. scheint es sich zum Ziel gesetzt zu haben, der Sprache ihre wirklichkeitskonstituierende Macht zu nehmen. Fasziniert von den fremden Orten, strahlen die Romane etwas von dieser Fremdheit auch auf den Leser aus, da sie seltsam konstruiert erscheinen und kaum realistisch anmuten. Sowohl die Faszination fremder Topographien als auch der Konstruktcharakter der Texte lassen sich biographisch erklaren. Als Kind einer judischen Kaufmannsfamilie in Wien verlast A. nach dem ›Anschlus‹ Osterreichs an das Deutsche Reich im Jahr 1938 seine Heimat und begibt sich auf eine Odyssee, die ihn fast um den gesamten Globus fuhren sollte. Nizza, Shanghai, Israel, England lauten die Stationen auf dem Weg in die USA, wo A. seit 1957 lebt. Ein Architekturstudium, das er in Israel absolvierte, mag vielleicht erklaren, weshalb seine »houses of fiction« (Henry James) wie auf einem Reisbrett konstruierte Entwurfe anmuten.

Metzler Lexikon Amerikanischer Autoren

“You are what you eat” is a popular phrase that this book dares to take entirely seriously: it uncovers connections between the alimentary and the ontological – between what or how one eats and what one is – in the work of four influential twentieth-century authors. In respect of the modernist aspects of the century, it looks at Georges Bataille and Samuel Beckett; in respect of its postmodernist aspects, it looks at Paul Auster and Margaret Atwood. Examining strange or unusual acts of eating, Eating Otherwise shows that these, and the ontological questions they prompt, provide a perspective through which modernism, postmodernism, and the relationship between them can be considered. The book will invigorate literary food studies in examining the philosophical implications of literary representations of eating. This will in turn add to other relevant fields such as critical animal studies, and will contribute to twentieth-century literary studies by providing, firstly, in-depth readings of four major authors and, secondly, an alimentary angle to debates on modernism and postmodernism.

Eating Otherwise: The Philosophy of Food in Twentieth-Century Literature

Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Preface Introduction: Paul Auster's Intratext Uncontainable Assemblages "Thinging" Things Chapter 1: Smoke that Means the Entire World The Writer's Prosthetic Cigarette The Gathering of the Tobacco Shop Smoke is the Story Itself Chapter 2: The Story of the Typewriter Typewriter Associations The Typewriter-Assemblage Rhizomatic Typewriting The Machinic Muse Chapter 3: Doubles and Disappearances The Birth of the Double The Double Functions of the Double The Doppelganger in the Other Sex Double Game, and the Mingling of Texts Gotham Handbook Chapter 4: New York, Where All Quests Fail In Search of Auster's City In Austeralia Discovering the Notebooks Encountering the Writer Inconclusion Notes Bibliography Copyright Permissions Index

Paul Auster's Writing Machine: A Thing to Write With

This thesis employs popular culture texts (works of literature, film, and popular music) as
companions to the understanding of contemporary America. It is about artworks that form a
cultural resistance that enables the appreciation of social issues and cultural decline in the
United States. The authors of these artworks are novelist Paul Auster, filmmaker Jim
Jarmusch, and musician Tom Waits.
Born between the late 1940s and the early 1950s, in different parts of the United States,
Auster, Jarmusch, and Waits have produced a series of works that share strong similarities. In
their novels, films, and songs, they portray an imagined “Other America” that is in stark
contrast with the idyllic vision of the American Dream. Their America does not coincide with
conventional middle-class values and goals of success, money and social upward mobility. It
is an open, tolerant, and egalitarian country inhabited by marginalized “other Americans” who
never escape from poverty and failure. On one side, their works appear to be the backbone of
a 1980s counterculture, formed against the age of consumerism and hedonism, and critical of
everything American. On the other side, they constantly evoke symbols of traditional
American culture like the road, the frontier, the lone anti-hero, the adventure and hope for a
better future. Therefore, quintessentially American narrative symbols survive in the
alternative chronicle of a problematic America.
Commonalities in the works of Auster, Jarmusch and Waits, are closely observed in this
study; for instance the essential aesthetics, the recurring themes of decay and poverty, and the
urban settings. The thesis also focuses on the affinity that these works have with a traditional
American progressive thought. I argue that Auster, Jarmusch and Waits are heirs of a longestablished
lineage of American artists and thinkers. Like Henry David Thoreau, Walt
Whitman, and many others after them, they have both criticized their country and embraced
its original ideals of social justice and equality.
Embedded in this tradition of American resistance, the texts examined in this thesis are
ideal guides to the recent history of the United States. Although these works were not created
with an overt political intention, their authors assume an accidental role of social
commentators, by challenging the values of the dominant U.S. culture. Electing simplicity
over wealth, and failure over success, their stories praise the universal needs and a
Whitmanesque “absolute soul” that all humans share. The works of the Other America
recuperate a culture of the people that defies current tendencies of isolationism, greed and
selfishness that are typical of consumerism. Against the dominant culture, these artists
propose a return to an ideal human brotherhood that is the main principle of a long tradition of
Americans who, throughout the decades, formed a resistance against the surrounding culture.
The Other America of Auster, Jarmusch and Waits might be fictional, but it is a reminder of
life as it is, mirroring a harsh American reality of injustice, decay and sorrow. While so doing,
it never abandons a utopian impulse for life as it should be, namely the realization of a society
in which love is the only law.

The Other America of Paul Auster, Jim Jarmusch and Tom Waits

Public Personae and the Private I: De-Compositional Ontology in Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy

Introduction: Paul Auster and the Postmodern American Novel Paul Auster, or The Heir Intestate Paul Auster's Pseudonymous World In the Realm of the Naked Eye: The Poetry of Paul Auster "The Hunger Must Be Preserved at All Cost": A Reading of The Invention of Solitude The Detective and the Author: City of Glass Auster's Sublime Closure: The Locked Room "Looking for Signs in the Air": Urban Space and the Postmodern in In the Country of Last Things Inside Moon Palace The Music of Chance: Aleatorical (Dis)harmonies Within "The City of the World" Leviathan: Post Hoc Harmonies A Look Back from the Horizon Being Paul Auster's Ghost Paul Auster: A Selected Bibliography Contributors Index

Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster

Four Novels of 1939: Ambition and Redemption; Ethnicity and Race

Reviewed by: Perennal Earth: Poetry by Wallace Stevens and Paintings by Alexis Serio ed. by John N. Serio Dennis Barone Perennal Earth: Poetry by Wallace Stevens and Paintings by Alexis Serio. Edited by John N. Serio. Middlebury, Vermont: New Perennials Publishing, 2022. In his essay “Gifts,” Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested that gifts should be beautiful, not useful, for “a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.” Perennial Earth began with the act of giving at a challenging time. As Bill Vitek notes in his preface, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, John N. Serio started sending email messages that paired words by Wallace Stevens and images by his daughter, the painter Alexis Serio. A former colleague of John Serio’s and director of the New Perennials Project, a nonprofit platform at Middlebury College for critical thinking about ecology and the environment, Vitek suggested that a book might be made out of this mix of poetry and art. It is a beautiful offering indeed. Readers have appreciated the many fine covers that Alexis Serio has created for The Wallace Stevens Journal, and to see thirty-two new works alongside poems or poem excerpts by Wallace Stevens (several from “Sunday Morning”) will be a pleasure. For this exquisite book, one that well fits Emerson’s prescription for a gift, Glen MacLeod has provided a thoughtful introduction in which he notes correspondences between image and text. To my eye, “The Death of a Soldier” and A Tale of Many Skies on pages 36 and 37, a co-mingling of heavens and clouds, may have the most direct correspondence. It seems both artist and poet answer similar questions by different means and if the question ever seems obscure, the means are ever-present before us upon the pages. Alexis Serio works with topographical illusion and landscape abstraction; color and horizon are key in her work. The paintings always seem to fit—not merely to illustrate, but to exist alongside the poems. Each expressive form enhances the other. This is not “a compensation for what has been lost,” to borrow a phrase from Stevens’s essay “The Relations Between Poetry and Painting” (CPP 748), but a celebration of what is. Both Stevens and Alexis Serio have a questing curiosity—sometimes somber, sometimes bright; one in lines, the other through a painter’s light. Though we might associate Stevens in his adult years with Connecticut and Serio with Texas, both are from cities in those respective states known for their municipal rose gardens. Both painter and poet are seen here, as Stevens once put it, “Ploughing North America” (CPP 16). The poems and paintings are set side by side: sometimes a poem appears on the left, sometimes an image. Both paintings and texts are perennially rooted in earth, reaching into sky. Grant funding allows New Perennials Publishing to provide this and other books in free, downloadable format at https://www.newperennials.org. Yet Perennial Earth, with its nearly twenty-inch spread of poetry and paintings is better appreciated in print. The cloth edition has black endpapers and print on the spine. Sturdier and stronger than the paper version, the cloth version may be more suitable for the large format. Because the publisher does not sell books directly, copies must be ordered from Alexis Serio (alexisserioart.com). “The only gift is a portion of thyself,” Emerson insisted, and the Serios (both father and daughter, the scholar and the painter) have given much of [End Page 258] themselves, so that the volume invariably will make a successful offering. As the poet wrote in “Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight,” “We are two that use these roses as we are, / In seeing them. This is what makes them seem / So far beyond the rhetorician’s touch” (CPP 371). [End Page 259] Dennis Barone University of Saint Joseph Copyright © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press 

Dennis Barone

Papers

Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster

Four Novels of 1939: Ambition and Redemption; Ethnicity and Race

Perennal Earth: Poetry by Wallace Stevens and Paintings by Alexis Serio ed. by John N. Serio (review)