New research

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“The 1979 publication of Susan Gubar and Sandra M. Gilbert’s ground-breaking study The Madwoman in the Attic marked a founding moment in feminist literary history as much as feminist literary theory. In their extensive study of nineteenth-century women’s writing, Gubar and Gilbert offer radical re-readings of Jane Austen, the Brontës, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot and Mary Shelley tracing a distinctive female literary tradition and female literary aesthetic. Gubar and Gilbert raise questions about canonisation that continue to resonate today, and model the revolutionary importance of re-reading influential texts that may seem all too familiar.”

Text reproduced from https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/An_Analysis_of_Sandra_M_Gilbert_and_Susa/ucxmDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0 (accessed 14/10/24

Currently Reading

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The New York Trilogy is perhaps the most astonishing work by one of America’s most consistently astonishing writers. The Trilogy is three cleverly interconnected novels that exploit the elements of standard detective fiction and achieve a new genre that is all the more gripping for its starkness. It is a riveting work of detective fiction worthy of Raymond Chandler, and at the same time a profound and unsettling existentialist enquiry in the tradition of Kafka or Borges. In each story the search for clues leads to remarkable coincidences in the universe as the simple act of trailing a man ultimately becomes a startling investigation of what it means to be human. The New York Trilogy is the modern novel at its finest: a truly bold and arresting work of fiction with something to transfix and astound every reader.
Text reproduced from https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/the-new-york-trilogy-paul-auster (accessed 14/10/24)

Chris Marker Sans Soleil (Sunless)

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Chris Marker’s speculative travelogue-essay, reflecting on culture and history in narrated letters from Guinea to Japan to Iceland. A poetic documentary tour of Tokyo, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland and San Francisco, Sans Soleil mingles personal reflections with the history of the world. The female narrator reads letters sent by fictional Sandor Krasna, writing from ‘another world’. The spoken word, synthesized sound and haunting visuals investigate relationships between developed and developing societies. Virtuoso editing and special effects conjure the disorientation of a world traveller, journeying through cultures, secret rituals and confusions of time.

“The consummate cine-essay, framed as reportage from a roving cineaste, built mainly from Marker’s observations of the ‘empire of signs’ that is modern Japan and the poverty endemic in Guinea Bissau. Entertainingly provocative speculations on the ‘post-political’ world, haunted by the piano music of Mussorgsky.” Tony Rayns “A treatise on travel, on history, on art and on life, Marker’s film unfolds like an epistolary novel in dialogue with itself. His virtuosity with the camera is matched by the brilliance of the montage.” Bruce Jenkins

Text reproduced from https://www.bfi.org.uk/film/a9bab1d5-f6df-51d3-bdda-5e1beba14602/sans-soleil (accessed 08/03/24)

Hauntology

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“Ghosts and spectres, the eerie and the occult. Why is contemporary culture so preoccupied by the supernatural, so captivated by the revenants of an earlier age, so haunted? The concept of Hauntology has evolved since first emerging in the 1990s, and has now entered the cultural mainstream as a shorthand for our new-found obsession with the recent past. But where does this term come from and what exactly does it mean? This book seeks to answer these questions by examining the history of our fascination with the uncanny from the golden age of the Victorian ghost story to the present day. From Dickens to Derrida, MR James to Mark Fisher; from the rise of Spiritualism to the folk horror revival, Hauntology traces our continuing engagement with these esoteric ideas. Moving between the literary and the theoretical, the visual and the political, Hauntology explores our nostalgia for the cultural artefacts of a past from which we seem unable to break free.”

Text reproduced from https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0857304194/?coliid=I35KVFXNT9E223&colid=1G9PTRYRJ8YMC&psc=1&ref_=list_c_wl_lv_ov_lig_dp_it (accessed 12/09/24