Harvard University Press Publicity Blog

"Falling out of one's role with art"

That's the title of a new interview with Samuel Weber, author of Benjamin's -abilities, published in Issue 4 of the journal Parrhesia.

"A shattering of tradition"

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (2nd version)" (1935-36, unpublished in this form during Benjamin's lifetime):

"One might focus these aspects of the artwork in the concept of the aura, and go on to say: what withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of the work of art is the latter’s aura. This process is symptomatic; its significance extends far beyond the realm of art. It might be stated as a general formula that the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition. By replicating the work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to reach the recipient in his or her own situation, it actualizes that which is reproduced. These two processes lead to a massive upheaval in the domain of objects handed down from the past—a shattering of tradition which is the reverse side of the present crisis and renewal of humanity. Both processes are intimately related to the mass movements of our day."

The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media is available now from HUP.

Above: Drawing of Benjamin by Ralph Steadman, 2006.

Evelyn Ch'ien on Junot Diaz

Evelyn Ch'ien interviews Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) for the latest issue of Granta. Ch'ien, one of the first critics to address Diaz's work, is the author of Weird English (in which she devoted a chapter to Diaz's short story collection Drown) and the forthcoming The Edges of Language: Contours of Emotion in a Post-Symbolic Age.

Evolutionary fiction

At "Paper Cuts," the blog of the New York Times Book Review, Jennifer Schuessler wonders "How Would Darwin Read?" as she discusses William Flesch's Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction.

Greil Marcus is a knight

Well he is now, at least. Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, The Dustbin of History, Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession, and In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-1992, among others, was made Chevalier dans l’ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Government in order to honor his extraordinary contributions to arts and literature.

The award was presented at a ceremony in San Francisco at which Pierre-François Mourier, the French Consul General, spoke at length about Lipstick Traces and its reception in France, where it maintains a well-deserved place as a benchmark of cultural scholarship. According to a press release from the French Consulate:

The publication in France of “Lipstick Traces” by Allia Publisher, in 1998, had a huge impact on French readers and was highly celebrated in the press. The book, an investigation on rebellion in the XXth century, is one of the best and most precise studies of intellectual and artistic movements in France during this century: from the Dada to the Lettristes, from Isidore Isou to Guy Debord.

Lipstick Traces is currently available in a good-looking paperback edition, but the exciting news is that HUP will be publishing a special 20th-anniversary edition of the book in Fall 2009, timed to coincide with the appearance of the long-awaited and mammoth A New Literary History of America, co-edited by Marcus and Werner Sollors.

Walter Benjamin's archive published

Peter Conrad's review of Verso's new edition of Walter Benjamin's archive serves as a poignant reflection on the man himself and his ambition to exhume a forgotten European past before it vanished for good under the heavy boot of fascism. Don't forget that we're issuing the latest in our collection of Benjamin volumes this May, and this time it's the big one. "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" is Benjamin's most well-known work, a document that serves as a foundation for modern criticism, and probably one of the most endlessly-cited pieces written during the 20th Century.

Our new edition, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, collects the strongest version of this seminal essay, along with Benjamin's other writings on media, many appearing here for the first time in English. And carrying on with our tradition of making Benjamin's writings look as good as they read, we've illustrated the cover with a fantastic drawing of Benjamin by none other than Ralph Steadman of "Fear and Loathing" fame.

Worrying about China

Below, a fascinating talk from Geremie Barmé (author of the forthcoming Wonders of the World volume on The Forbidden City) delivered at the Australian launch of Gloria Davies' Worrying about China, a book that explores the way perfectionism permeates and ultimately propels Chinese intellectual thought:

The creation and repeated evocation of rhetorical enemies is a powerful tactic in the realm of intellectual contestation. It relies on a language rich in the vocabulary of moral evaluation, a language in which practitioners employ their ideas to give careful expression to unarticulated aims. Judgments are offered or passed by means of either positive or pejorative adjectives, adverbs, nouns and verbs. The ground for critical debates about social justice, political process, freedom of expression, diversity, openness and cultural possibility is turned into a treacherous topography marked out by confusing signs. A lazy dichotomy between left and right is constantly presented, allowing for entrenched positions with decades-long lineages to find seemingly new expression and easy advantage. In these distorting clashes among concerned individuals, issues both of the moment and the monumental rise and fall in importance. All the while the marketplace of ideas with its media outlets celebrates those whose rhetorical flights generate sales, even if they narrow the horizons of how people can think.

Zizek on "Ecology without Nature"

Last March we published Timothy Morton's Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, in which the author argues that the chief stumbling block to environmental thinking is the idea of nature itself. It's an intriguing thesis, and Morton's book marshals an eclectic range of sources to put together an argument for what he calls "dark ecology."

Well, it turns out that none other than world-renowned theorist Slavoj Zizek has gotten his hands on a copy of Ecology without Nature. Presumably he read it and liked it, because he decided to give a lecture on it in Athens that, fortunately for us internet users, has been posted on YouTube for our viewing enjoyment. We've embedded part one below and will provide links to the other five parts, but here's a quick précis transcribed from the talk:

The underlying message of this predominant ecological ideology is a deeply conservative one: any change can only be a change for the worse.  So what is wrong here?  What is wrong I think is the … principal position … that there is something like “nature,” which we humans, with our hubris, with our will to dominate, disturbed … [W]e know Jacques Lacan's motto, “The big Other doesn't exist.”  I think we should extend this to nature.  The first premise of a truly radical ecology should be, “Nature doesn't exist.” … So again what we need is ecology without nature, ecology that accepts this open, imbalanced, denaturalized, if you want, character of nature itself.  [I]t is … all too easy to attribute our disbelief in the catastrophe to the impregnation of our minds by scientific ideology.  [The] standard thesis of the predominant ecology … says something like this: “The ultimate cause of our ecological problems is modern technology, Cartesian subjectivity, within which we are abstract beings somehow outside nature, who can manipulate nature, dominate nature … what we should rediscover is that nature is not out there, an object of our manipulation.  Nature is our very background, we are wired to nature, embedded in nature.  You should go out, feel, breathe nature.  You should accept that your abstract scientific reification … is just an alienating effect of being embedded in the life world.”  I think that far from offering a solution, this kind of reference to our immediate living experience is the cause of the problem.

Links to the lecture: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. First part is embedded below.

||| Learn more about Ecology without Nature.

Three new I Tatti volumes

We're pleased to announce three additions to the I Tatti Renaissance Library for the fall season:

• Pietro Bembo's History of Venice chronicles the internal politics and external affairs of the legendary republic, principally conflicts with other European states (France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, Milan, and the papacy) and with the Turks in the East. History of Venice, Volume 1, Books I-IV is the first in a projected three-volume edition of this seminal work, available now for the first time in English.

• Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444) was the leading civic humanist of the Italian Renaissance, famous in his day as a translator, orator, and historian, as well as the best-selling author of the fifteenth century. His History of the Florentine People is generally considered the first modern work of history, and was widely imitated by humanist historians for two centuries after its official publication by the Florentine Signoria in 1442. This third volume concludes the edition, the first to make the work available in English translation.

• Pius II (1405–1464) began life as Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini in a small town near Siena and became a famous Latin poet and diplomat. Originally an opponent of the papacy as well as something of a libertine, Aeneas eventually reconciled himself with the Roman church and became a priest, then a cardinal. Finally he was elected Pope Pius II (1458) and dedicated his pontificate to organizing a pan-European crusade against the Ottoman Empire. Pius’s Commentaries, the only autobiography ever written by a pope, was composed in elegant humanistic Latin modeled on Caesar and Cicero. This edition contains a fresh Latin text based on the last manuscript written in Pius’s lifetime and an updated and corrected version of the 1937 translation by Florence Alden Gragg.

More on the I Tatti Renaissance Library--history, purpose and forthcoming volumes.

Waters sets 'em straight

Over at the National Book Critics Circle's "Critical Mass" blog, our own Executive Editor for the Humanities Lindsay Waters delivers a typically strident defense of criticism:

If we prohibit the critical encounter the way some in the academic world want to do, or if we declare it an expendable extra in the newspapers the way many owners of newspapers are doing, the loss to the citizenry of America will be permanent and lead to surprising results. The Law of Unintended Consequences is more basic to human life than the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Criticism is Tom Paine; it’s Lester Bangs; it’s Robert Christgau, Ed Park, Greil Marcus, Ellen Willis, Howard Hampton, Paul Goodman. It can be as silly as some of the lists of "top 10" movies or novels are; and it can be as serious as Manny Farber and Pauline Kael reviewing the movies. The core of it is always judgment, the judgment of the critic on the judgment of the artist that the work has been made and is ready to go out into the world. The reason — deep, subtle, easy to miss — that acts of critical judgment are acts that are central to human life is that they are activities that lead to the creation of new brain cells. Killing the book reviews is like poisoning the water system right at the city well.

Read the rest here.