from CHICAGO literature and criticism The Thinking Literature Series Nan Z. Da and Anahid Nersessian, Series Editors Alan Thomas, Acquiring Editor Thinking Literature publishes books committed to the intensive, expansive exploration of how literature thinks, and to the refinement of literary criticism as a mode of reasoning in and about the world. Radium of the Word Cartesian Poetics A Poetics of Materiality The Art of Thinking Craig Dworkin Andrea Gadberry “We count on Dworkin to say the smartest things “Cartesian Poetics brilliantly integrates historical sen- about contemporary poetics, so the smartness of sitivity and speculative boldness. Tracing a ‘literary Radium of the Word comes as no surprise. What life of concepts’ through the riddle, the love lyric, does come as a surprise is the book’s first sentence: the elegy, and the anagram, Gadberry gives us a new ‘This book proposes a methodology.’ And it does history of Descartes’s philosophical coming of age. not disappoint. Dworkin is reinventing the practice Her nuanced close readings, which make dazzling of reading by unscrewing the locks on its doors. use of wit as an engine of literary-critical investiga- Not close, not distant, not surface, not formal, not tion, awaken us to a conception of poetic form historical, not reparative, not paranoid reading. that lives in and between thoughts—that makes This book bypasses adjectives and heads straight ‘thinking,’ in the largest sense, possible.”—Gerard for the nouns: the death penalty, paper cuts, opera Passannante, University of Maryland, College Park queens, gossip, songs, riots, print, quotation marks, 2020 224 p. 6 x 9 homelessness, names, the typeset line, spaces, prose. 3 Paper ISBN: 978-0-226-72302-0 $27.50 Your Price: $22.00 Oh, and poetry. This is a difficult book that every- body should read.”—Virginia Jackson, University of California, Irvine A Defense of Judgment 2020 264 p. 6 x 9 21 halftones Michael W. Clune 1 Paper ISBN: 978-0-226-74356-1 $30.00 Your Price: $24.00 “A Defense of Judgment is a characteristically bril- Strange Likeness liant, strongly argued, intellectually accessible Description and the Modernist Novel attempt to provide a template for rethinking the Dora Zhang role of value judgments in teaching and writing (and thinking) about literature, and by implication “Strange Likeness rearranges what we think we know the arts generally. Clune’s discussion is continually about modernism’s relation to realism—and to ques- illuminating, as are the exemplary readings he offers tions of objectivity, psychology, social convention, of works by Dickinson, Brooks, and Thomas Bern- and collective life. Zhang is a gifted critic, beauti- hard.”—Michael Fried, Johns Hopkins University fully attentive to details and large patterns, precise in her analytic vocabulary, and admirably thorough “[Clune] takes on a question central to the future in her range of theoretical and historical reference. of literary studies and offers a forceful and persuasive Her lucid, ambitious book deserves to be widely read answer, one that is likely to spark a lot of debate and debated.”—David Kurnick, Rutgers University and almost certainly some controversy.” 2020 240 p. 6 x 9 —Timothy Aubry, City University of New York 2 Paper ISBN: 978-0-226-72252-8 $27.50 Your Price: $22.00 2021 256 p. 51/2 x 81/2 4 Paper ISBN: 978-0-226-77015-4 $27.50 Your Price: $22.00 1 Keats’s Odes Epidemic Empire A Lover’s Discourse Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, Anahid Nersessian 1817–2020 “Intense emotion abounds in this literary blend of Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb analysis and autobiography. In six essays that “Raza Kolb renders a startling account of the extent examine each of Keats’s Great Odes, Nersessian to which figures of illness, disease, and virality tells a ‘kind of love story’ between herself and the saturate quotidian discourses on terrorism and race poems.”—Publishers Weekly from the nineteenth century to the present. Uncan- “[Keats’s Odes] appears freed by the sensuous- nily prescient yet historically profound, Epidemic ness of Keats’s own verse, standing on the verge of Empire allows us to glimpse the future of pandemics becoming something more than literary criticism. from the racial prisms of the past. The temporal arc While not an imitation of Keatsian style, Nerses- is sublime, and the writing, exquisite.”—Jasbir K. sian shares his willingness for vulnerability and for Puar, Rutgers University 2021 392 p. 6 x 9 24 halftones writing that enfleshes the experience of being subject 8 Paper ISBN: 978-0-226-73935-9 $35.00 Your Price: $28.00 to the world because you are a subject in it.”— Los Angeles Review of Books The Teaching Archive 2021 160 p. 51/2 x 81/2 5 Cloth ISBN: 978-0-226-76267-8 $20.00 Your Price: $16.00 A New History for Literary Study Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan The Calamity Form “The Teaching Archive shows us what we should On Poetry and Social Life always have known: the history of English is not Anahid Nersessian the history of big books of criticism talking to other 2020 240 p. 6 x 9 10 halftones big books of criticism. Instead it is the history of 6 Paper ISBN: 978-0-226-70131-8 $27.50 Your Price: $22.00 students and teachers talking to each other in the classroom, where what goes on has often been quite The Opening of the different from what conventional histories of the American Mind discipline have assumed. Buurma and Heffernan Ten Years of The Point reanimate the twentieth-century classroom, and The Point in the process they reanimate our understanding “The Point is unique among the intellectual journals of the profession.”—Louis Menand, author of The of our time in its genuine openness to a range of Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the perspectives, and its commitment to pluralism American University reflects a conviction that thought cuts deepest “The Teaching Archive makes untenable much when it is permitted to find its own path. The of the received wisdom about twentieth-century essays in this volume are without exception lucid, English studies; it makes silenced classroom voices striking, intelligent, and well argued; they are also audible once more.”—Deirdre Shauna Lynch, idiosyncratic, surprising, and original.”—Michael author of Loving Literature: A Cultural History Clune, author of Defense of Judgment 2020 320 p. 6 x 9 25 halftones 2020 392 p. 6 x 9 9 Paper ISBN: 978-0-226-73613-6 $30.00 Your Price: $24.00 7 Paper ISBN: 978-0-226-73871-0 $18.00 Your Price: $14.40 2 Now in Paperback Of Bridges The Ruins Lesson A Poetic and Philosophical Account Meaning and Material in Western Culture Thomas Harrison Susan Stewart “Of Bridges is a dazzling investigation into the pro- “[Stewart] charts the West’s fascination with decayed found semantic and historical resonance of the seem- remains, from Egyptian relics to contemporary ingly simple word bridge. Harrison has chapters monuments of destruction and trauma. The Ruins on every possible aspect of bridging, for example, the Lesson is a sweeping cultural history that draws musical bridge, the poetic bridge as in Hart Crane’s in Renaissance humanism, eighteenth-century famous poem by that title, the actual historic bridges changes in representing the past and the Romantic of Greece and Rome, and the ‘thought’ bridges of reconfiguration of memory. Stewart writes with Nietzsche and Heidegger. Throughout, Harrison’s poetic grace and a nonspecialist’s appreciation of book is astonishingly learned, well written, and imagi- printmaking, painting, literature and architecture. native. Bridges will never be the same after this bril- Readers outside the academy will find much to value liant study.”—Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University 2021 304 p. 6 x 9 3 color plates, 73 halftones in this lovely book.”—Washington Post 13 Cloth ISBN: 978-0-226-73529-0 $35.00 Your Price: $28.00 2021 400 p. 7 x 10 11 color plates, 80 halftones 10 Paper ISBN: 978-0-226-79220-0 $28.00 Your Price: $22.40 The Porch Dark Lens Meditations on the Edge of Nature Imaging Germany, 1945 Charlie Hailey Françoise Meltzer “The Porch first appears to be a study of a minor “Meltzer’s meditation on her mother’s searing architectural element, but it turns into a meditation photographs of German ruins is bold yet subtle. on the secrets of human existence and the world. Meltzer suggests a way of looking at pictures of . This book is a delightful invitation to the joys of destruction without lapsing into either moral relativ- reading, imagining, and dreaming.”—Juhani Pallas- ism or another cycle of blame and retribution.” maa, professor emeritus, Aalto University, Helsinki 2021 224 p. 51/2 x 81/2 6 halftones, 6 line drawings —Ulrich C. Baer, New York University 14 Cloth ISBN: 978-0-226-76995-0 $22.50 Your Price: $18.00 2019 256 p. 6 x 9 4 color plates, 41 halftones 11 Cloth ISBN: 978-0-226-62563-8 $35.00 Your Price: $28.00 Mental Traveler Landscape as Weapon A Father, a Son, and a Journey through Cultures of Exhaustion and Refusal Schizophrenia John Beck W. J. T. Mitchell “Exploring pastoral landscapes, industrial sprawl, “Combines a scholar’s intellect with a father’s inti- abandoned ruins, bunkers, and much more, Land- mate perspective. A kaleidoscopic and erudite scape as Weapon is an essential reminder that how we memoir of madness and sanity, this is also, at its think of places and their pasts is pivotal to how we core, a stunning account of what endures in the live now.”—Stephen Graham, author of Vertical: The wake of catastrophic tragedies: love, art, and vast City from Satellites to Bunkers stores of human hope.”—Rachel DeWoskin, author Distributed for Reaktion Books of Two Menus 2021 208 p.