A companion to last season's The Human Country: New and collected Stories, this volume collects all of Harry Mathews's non-fiction, including an astonishing range of essays which discuss everything from complex literary and musical forms to the works of Lewis Carroll, Raymond Roussel, Italo Calvino, Joseph McElroy, George Perec and the OuLiPo. Throughout the collection, Mathews examines the relationship between form and literature in a lucid, intimate voice, arguing with erudition, grace and humour for the importance of artifice.
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Mathews is an American writer and literary critic whose creative and interpretive philosophies were shaped profoundly by his expatriate years in France, where he fell in with the Oulipo (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature; famous names include Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, and Italo Calvino). A group of mathematically inclined writers with a penchant for the complex, the obscure, and the musical, the Oulipo fiction-writing strategy involves placing formulaic and often arbitrary constraints on the writing process (no using the letter e, for example) to make it appear strange and thus elicit hidden representations and accidental truths. Mathews' reverence for his fellow Oulipians is clear, and as a non-native French speaker, his fascination with the "hiddenness of language" is multiplied by the challenge of linguistic and cultural translation. Covering a wide range of topics--Wagner to Lewis Carroll to magical Venice to Andre Breton's sex life, plus extensive coverage of his Oulipian compatriots--Mathew's essays are full of intelligence and challenge, to be enjoyed by lit-crit fans and readers of Mathews' own fiction. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Harry Mathews is a writer of immense elegance and skill." -- New York Review of Books
"Harry Mathews is the only American author I know whose utter originality does not erode his heart and his content." -- Ned Rorem
"Like Roubaud and Perec, Mathews engineers a funhouse labyrinth in which quise defigures guise." -- Voice Literary Supplement
"Harry Mathews is the only American author I know whose utter originality does not erode his heart and his content." -- Ned Rorem
"Like Roubaud and Perec, Mathews engineers a funhouse labyrinth in which quise defigures guise." -- Voice Literary Supplement
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Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs):
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porto flip, invented slang, using existing material, suis français, breathing wind Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
James Mayn, Miss Banquett, Sancho Panza, Grace Kimball, Port Huntlady, The Duplications, New York, Lady Port-Huntlady, Georges Perec, Progress of Stories, Raymond Roussel, André Breton, Don Quixote, Les Choses, Larry Shearson, Jimmy Banks, Locus Solus, Nyog Papendes, Review of Contemporary Fiction, The Skin of Dreams, Amos Frothingham, Comte de Lautréamont, Isidore Ducasse, Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau New!
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
porto flip, invented slang, using existing material, suis français, breathing wind Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
James Mayn, Miss Banquett, Sancho Panza, Grace Kimball, Port Huntlady, The Duplications, New York, Lady Port-Huntlady, Georges Perec, Progress of Stories, Raymond Roussel, André Breton, Don Quixote, Les Choses, Larry Shearson, Jimmy Banks, Locus Solus, Nyog Papendes, Review of Contemporary Fiction, The Skin of Dreams, Amos Frothingham, Comte de Lautréamont, Isidore Ducasse, Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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