Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon

Posted on April 11, 2012 by stuartelden

Details here; review at Berfrois here.

The most celebrated American novelist of the past half-century, an indispensable figure of postmodernism worldwide, Thomas Pynchon notoriously challenges his readers. This Companion provides tools for meeting that challenge. Comprehensive, accessible, lively, up-to-date and reliable, it approaches Pynchon’s fiction from various angles, calling on the expertise of an international roster of scholars at the cutting edge of Pynchon studies. Part I covers Pynchon’s fiction novel-by-novel from the 1960s to the present, including such indisputable classics as The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. Part II zooms out to give a bird’s-eye-view of Pynchon’s novelistic practice across his entire career. Part III surveys major topics of Pynchon’s fiction: history, politics, alterity (‘otherness’) and science and technology. Designed for students, scholars and fans alike, the Companion begins with a biography of the elusive author and ends with a coda on how to read Pynchon and a bibliography for further reading.

Posted in Thomas Pynchon | 1 Comment

Lego Social Theory

Posted on April 11, 2012 by stuartelden

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More Lego Social Theory – here. Thanks to Ben R for the link – Anthony Giddens, Angela McRobbie and Stuart Hall. The original figures of Foucault, Butler, Giddens and McRobbie are here.

Posted in Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Gunnar Olsson on Reading Kant’s Geography

Posted on April 10, 2012 by stuartelden

A detailed and very generous review (which becomes much more) of Reading Kant’s Geography by Gunnar Olsson in Geografiska Annaler B: Human Geography (requires subscription):

So hot are the connections between the geography/anthropology courses and Kant’s overall philosophy that the critics have not been able to wait for the Physical Geography to appear but are hungrily rushing to explore them. Such is the context of Reading Kant’s Geography, a timely collection of eighteen essays woven into a coherent matrix by the two editors Stuart Elden and Eduardo Mendieta. A splendid job, by its nature an inherently interdisciplinary endeavour, at the same time a window to the past and a gateopener to the future…

And here is one of the few quarrels I have with the editors who chose to entitle this section as ‘Kant’s geography of reason’ and not as ‘Kant’s cartographic reason’. For what is at stake is not the particular geographic knowledge that the Königsberger happened to catch in his conceptual net, but the structure of the net itself. ‘It is, therefore, just as necessary to make our concepts sensible, that is, to add the object of them in the intuition, as to make our intuitions intelligible, that is, to bring them under concepts. These two powers or capacities cannot exchange their functions. The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise. But that is no reason for confounding the contribution of either with that of the other; rather it is a strong reason for carefully separating the one from the other’ (Kant 2003, A51/B75). It follows that a priori knowledge is possible only under the provision that the objects of experience conform to the constitution of our minds, only if body and imagination can be perfectly mapped one onto the other. The ensuing power struggle is by definition a struggle over limits, the struggle over limits itself a matter of drawing a line, of pointing and naming.

Posted in Books, Eduardo Mendieta, Gunnar Olsson, Immanuel Kant, My Publications | Leave a comment

Reading suggestions

Posted on April 10, 2012 by stuartelden

Thanks for the suggestions in comments. Some very good ideas that should keep me busy – but clear that there are so many good things to read that I won’t be doing much re-reading… I won’t be following up on all, but some thoughts in response:

Milan Kundera – read Unbearable Lightness and Immortality some years back, so yes, perhaps worth something else.

Haruki Murakami – only read Norwegian Wood, and waiting for 1Q84 to come out in paperback. Maybe something else in the meantime?

Flaubert – this I have read a reasonable amount: Madame Bovary, Trois contes, Temptation of Saint Antony, the Egypt book – maybe will give Salammbo a go.

Proust – well, I’ve said he is my ‘broken leg’ project. I really want to read it in French too, so it’s not for me when faint-hearted.

Piers Plowman I have read quite recently

Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love – looks interesting, will take a look

Tim Ingold’s Lines isn’t a novel, but yes, something I should certainly read. As for the Situationists – have read much of Debord and a little Vanaigem. Andy Merrifield’s book on Debord is good; and I have McKenzie Wark’s The Beach Beneath the Street to read soon.

JG Ballard – not tried anything, though that’s a good idea. Same with Malcolm Bradbury or William Gibson.

Julian Barnes – read a few; A Sense of an Ending looks very slender and so resisted the hardback price.

Michel Houellebecq – read The Map and the Territory earlier this year, which was okay. Isn’t Elementary Particles also known in English as Atomised?

Roberto Bolaño- okay, I’m going to confess my previous ignorance, but from what I’ve seen online he sounds fascinating. I have ordered 2666 and Nazi Literature in the Americas (Durham has nothing in translation) and will see how I get on.

And some new ones of my own – I recently read Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (it was mentioned in a Derek Gregory lecture) and plan to read Cartography soon. I read Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections last year and Freedom is in the ‘to read’ pile. J.M. Coetzee – I’ve read Disgrace, Lives of Animals, and Waiting for the Barbarians, and currently reading Elizabeth Costello – always appreciate them (‘enjoy’ is not the right word) so maybe more to read here…

Posted in Books | 9 Comments

Rereading novels

Posted on April 9, 2012 by stuartelden

The Guardian has a couple of features on rereading novels – a piece discussing it here, and some contemporary authors’ favourite novels to re-read here. This isn’t something I do very often with novels. I did when younger but now I don’t read novels enough as it is, and though I’ve tried to read more the last couple of years (I kept a log last year here and here), there is always so much more to read. In 1995 I had a summer in France, in Chamonix, and took with me several cheap classics thinking that it wouldn’t matter if I couldn’t get them all home at the end. In that time, read a load of things I’d never read in full before – Don Quixote, War and Peace, all the Sherlock Holmes books, Candide, Vanity Fair, lots of Dickens, most of Dostoyevsky, Wilkie Collins… Looking back I guess that meant I read some things in bad translations, and surprisingly I didn’t read much by French novelists – I’ve still read little or nothing of Stendhal, Balzac, Zola, or Proust. I have read most or much of Camus, Gide, Sartre and Genet though. It was that summer I also worked through a pile of Heidegger texts and drafted a long paper that was the basis for the chapters on him in Mapping the Present.

I’ve been trying to think of novels I have revisited in recent years, and the two that came to mind are Moby Dick and The Name of the Rose. The latter I’ve read probably four times; Foucault’s Pendulum twice; but Eco’s others only once each, and The Prague Cemetery is still on the ‘to read’ pile (it’s a hardback, so it never ends up in luggage on trips). Many of the contemporary authors I like – Rushdie, Pynchon, Fowles, Sebald, Faulks – I’ve read most or much of, but usually only once each. Just recently – partly as a result of the Kindle app on the iPad – I’ve reread Heart of Darkness and Frankenstein. Academic books are another matter – I’ve read books like Being and Time, Discipline and Punish, and The Production of Space multiple times. Literary works I’ve written about – Antigone, Beowulf, and plays by Shakespeare – I’ve read several times, though I only read Gargantua and Pantagruel the once (the emphasis was squarely on Lefebvre’s reading, not mine).

So what am I missing? What books should I reread or should I have read?

Posted in Books, Henri Lefebvre, Mapping the Present, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Travel, Umberto Eco, William Shakespeare | 10 Comments

Ralph Fiennes on Coriolanus

Posted on April 7, 2012 by stuartelden

Interesting interview – though the bit on Coriolanus is about 18 minutes in.

Posted in William Shakespeare | Leave a comment

Palgrave Pivot

Posted on April 6, 2012 by stuartelden

Palgrave Macmillan is delighted to announce a new imprint: Palgrave Pivot. Launching globally in Autumn 2012 and publishing across the Humanities and Social Sciences, Palgrave Pivot liberates scholarship from the straitjacket of traditional formats and business models. It offers authors the flexibility of publishing at lengths between the journal article and the conventional monograph. The new imprint will be available as digital collections for libraries, including via Palgrave Connect, individual ebooks for personal use, and as digitally-produced print editions.
Palgrave Pivot will emphasize speed of delivery as well as innovation. The imprint undertakes to publish within 3 months of acceptance after full peer review…

Titles for Palgrave Pivot are:

– focused on new important research, or are a review of an area with broad appeal

– shorter than a typical scholarly monograph, at an average of 100 pages (or 35 thousand words), meaning that they are faster to write, concise and more digestible for readers

– published exceptionally fast to make new or timely research available more quickly

– rigorously peer-reviewed

– published in print and ebook formats

More details here. Will be interesting to see if they really can deliver in 3 months – and if the prices are made reasonable given the brevity of the books…

Posted in Books, Publishing | Leave a comment

review of New Geographies 4: Scales of the Earth

Posted on April 6, 2012 by stuartelden

Nice review of this project, here –

New Geographies, a publication series initiated and edited by six doctoral candidates at the Harvard Graduate School of Design… Distancing itself from conventional positions and professional boundaries, the journal collects critical essays and projects to expose new venues for inquiring and producing inventive knowledge… New Geographies, 4: Scales of the Earth, edited by El Hadi Jazairy, centers on the concept of scale as an alternative framework to address global concerns and space…

Posted in My Publications, Publishing, The Space of the World | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Exterritory conference

Posted on April 6, 2012 by stuartelden

You can now download the programme and details of the Exterritory conference in Paris on May 2nd 2012 in a press kit. The event is taking place at the Kadist Art Foundation. Their website is here – it uses a lot of flash so it’s difficult to link to specific pages, but here’s the brief description:

A symposium conceived by artists Maayan Amir & Ruti Sela moderated by Anat Ben-David with Angus Cameron, Dana Diminescu, Stuart Elden and Laurent Jeanpierre

Wednesday, May 2, 2012, from 5 pm to 9 pm at COMPTOIR GENERAL 80 quai de Jemmapes, 75010 Paris

“Exterritory is an art project whose goal is to encourage both the theoretical and practical exploration of ideas concerning Extraterritoriality in an interdisciplinary context.”

Co-organised by Kadist Art Foundation and Evens Foundation.

The press kit also includes an interesting New York Times story about the project, which you can also find here. There is a French piece about the work in Multitudes; more press clippings here; and the project website is here. Below are two film clips about a previous part of this project.

Posted in Conferences, Events, Territory | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Every Revolution has its Space: from Occupying Squares to Transforming Cities?

Posted on April 5, 2012 by stuartelden

OpenSpace is pleased to announce this Leverhulme Visiting Professorship event at The University of Manchester:

“Every Revolution has its Space: from Occupying Squares to Transforming Cities?”

Presentations by:

Erik Swyngedouw, Professor of Geography, University of Manchester

Andy Merrifield, Leverhulme Visiting Professor, Department of Geography, University of Manchester

Neil Smith, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography, CUNY Graduate Center, New York

Date:   25th April

Venue: Cordingley Lecture Theatre, Humanities Bridgeford Street building, Oxford Road, University of Manchester (http://bit.ly/HQiOeE)

Time: 4-6.30 pm

All welcome, no registration necessary.

This event is organised by:

OpenSpace:  An interdisciplinary forum for doctoral and postdoctoral research supporting dialogue on cities and beyond, initiated by PhD researchers in the Department of Geography

And is supported by:

The Leverhulme Trust: Visiting Professorships

The University of Manchester Cities Initiative (cities@manchester):

http://www.cities.manchester.ac.uk/

The Urban Transformations Research Group, Department of Geography, University of Manchester

For further information, please contact joanna.tantanasi@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk

Posted in Conferences, Neil Smith, Politics | Tagged , , | 5 Comments