{"title":"Stephen Watson","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"city-imagined-book-stephen-watson-9780143024736","title":"A city imagined","description":"In A city imagined, the editor has asked a number of South Africa's writers to produce a piece of writing in which they express their relationship to Cape Town and, above all, their sense of the unique genius or spirit of this city. The range of voices is wide, the angles of vision many, the results always surprising. What emerges from A city imagined is a composite portrait of Cape Town which is infinitely more various, heterogeneous, complex even in its beauty, than that to be found in the standard treatments of the place.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49588755169553,"sku":"GOR002086161","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51495760953617,"sku":"GOR012454925","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0143024736.jpg?v=1751258660"},{"product_id":"crescent-moon-over-the-rational-book-stephen-h-watson-9780804761253","title":"Crescent Moon Over the Rational","description":"Why, and in what manner, did artist Paul Klee have such a significant impact on twentieth-century thinkers? His art and his writing inspired leading philosophers to produce key texts in twentieth-century aesthetics, texts that influenced subsequent art history and criticism.    Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard, Sartre, Foucault, Blanchot, Derrida, and Marion are among the philosophers who have engaged with Klee's art and writings. Their views are often thought to be distant from each other, but Watson puts them in conversation. His point is not to vindicate any final interpretation of Klee but to allow his interpreters' different accounts to interact, to shed light on their and on Klee's work, and, in turn, to delineate both a history and a theoretical problematic in their midst. Crescent Moon over the Rational reveals an evolving theoretical constellation of interpretations and their questions (theoretical, artistic, and political) that address and continually renew Klee's rich legacies.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50029736526097,"sku":"GOR013841275","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52740170547473,"sku":"NIN9780804761253","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0804761256.jpg?v=1757416632"},{"product_id":"song-of-the-broken-string-book-stephen-watson-9781878818430","title":"Song of the Broken String","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe \/Xam Bushmen, hunters, gatherers, some poets among them, were a stone age people who survived nearly 5,000 years in the region now known as the Cape Province of South Africa. By the turn of this century they had completely disappeared, destroyed finally by the murderous European settlement of the interior. Song of the Broken String has its provenance in the oral tradition of this ancient culture. In the 1860s, a German linguist named W. H. Bleek become aware of the genocide in progress. Taking into his service three \/Xam Bushmen he found working as convict laborers in a chain gang, he set about preserving a small part of their heritage. After devising a phonetic notation of the \/Xam's language, he transcribed the personal narratives, songs, and folktales of these three men and translated them into English. Housed in an archive at the University of Cape Town, the 12,000 pages of the Bleek and Lloyd Collection are all that remains of this people and their language. Stephen Watson, a contemporary South African poet, has explored this archive, re-translating Bleek's word-for-word English prose into poems in which something of the power of those original voices lives on, however filtered through the 19th century ethnographer and the 20th century writer. The results not only offer a path into a powerful oral tradition, but also raise questions about the ways in which we listen to and translate cultures that are distant or lost. Song of the Broken String does not bring back the \/Xam, it is not a collection of artifacts. Something survives here that is almost monumental, certainly beautiful. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eStephen Watson, a contemporary South African poet and writer, has explored this archive, re-translating Bleek's word- for- word English prose into poems in which the power of these original voices would live on. However filtered through the 19th century ethnographer and the 20th century writer, poetry seemed the obvious form for this dialogue. The results not only offer a way into a powerful oral tradition but also raise questions about the ways in which we listen to and translate cultures that are distant or lost, cultures in whose fate we are somehow complicit. \u003ci\u003eSong of the Broken String\u003c\/i\u003e does not bring back the \/Xam, but it makes their ghosts vital presences in our own literary tradition.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50244369907985,"sku":"CIN1878818430G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50327697031441,"sku":"CIN1878818430VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1878818430.jpg?v=1751379221"},{"product_id":"powerful-kindness-the-story-of-judges-and-ruth-book-emily-pressley-stephen-watson-9781649110084","title":"Powerful Kindness: The Story of Judges and Ruth","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51579391443217,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51579391574289,"sku":"CIN1649110081VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1649110081.jpg?v=1750800365"},{"product_id":"root-rage-book-stephen-watson-9781326578275","title":"Root Rage","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53495662412049,"sku":"NIN9781326578275","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781326578275.jpg?v=1777864938"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-stephen-watson.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}