{"title":"Peter Schwenger","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"tears-of-things-book-peter-schwenger-9780816646319","title":"The Tears of Things","description":"We surround ourselves with material things that are invested with memories but can only stand for what we have lost. Physical objects—such as one’s own body—situate and define us; yet at the same time they are fundamentally indifferent to us. The melancholy of this rift is a rich source of inspiration for artists.   Peter Schwenger deftly weaves together philosophical and psychoanalytical theory with artistic practice. Concerned in part with the act of collecting, The Tears of Things is itself a collection of exemplary art objects—literary and cultural attempts to control and possess things—including paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe and René Magritte; sculpture by Louise Bourgeois and Marcel Duchamp; Joseph Cornell’s boxes; Edward Gorey’s graphic art; fiction by Virginia Woolf, Georges Perec, and Louise Erdrich; the hallucinatory encyclopedias of Jorge Luis Borges and Luigi Serafini; and the corpse photographs of Joel Peter Witkin.   However, these representations of objects perpetually fall short of our aspirations. Schwenger examines what is left over—debris and waste—and asks what art can make of these. What emerges is not an art that reassembles but one that questions what it means to assemble in the first place. Contained in this catalog of waste is that ultimate still life, the cadaver, where the subject-object dichotomy receives its final ironic reconciliation.   Peter Schwenger is professor of English at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning, Letter Bomb: Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding Word, and Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth-Century Literature.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49547603411217,"sku":"GOR006667212","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49581249102097,"sku":"GOR011967870","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50947959587089,"sku":"NGR9780816646319","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0816646317.jpg?v=1764844544"},{"product_id":"asemic-book-peter-schwenger-9781517906979","title":"Asemic","description":"The first critical study of writing without language    In recent years, asemic writing—writing without language—has exploded in popularity, with anthologies, a large-scale art exhibition, and flourishing interest on sites like tumblr, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram. Yet this burgeoning, fascinating field has never received a dedicated critical study. Asemic fills that gap, proposing new ways of rethinking the nature of writing.  Pioneered in the work of creators such as Henri Michaux, Roland Barthes, and Cy Twombly, asemic writing consolidated as a movement in the 1990s. Author Peter Schwenger first covers these “asemic ancestors” before moving to current practitioners such as Michael Jacobson, Rosaire Appel, and Christopher Skinner, exploring how asemic writing has evolved and gained importance in the contemporary era.  Asemic includes intriguing revelations about the relation of asemic writing to Chinese characters, the possibility of asemic writing in nature, and explanations of how we can read without language. Written in a lively style, this book will engage scholars of contemporary art and literary theory, as well as anyone interested in what writing was and what it is now in the process of becoming.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49734806995217,"sku":"NGR9781517906979","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49926271467793,"sku":"CIN1517906970G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51375012217105,"sku":"CIN1517906970VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51516767404305,"sku":"GOR010719174","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1517906970.jpg?v=1763477724"},{"product_id":"at-the-borders-of-sleep-book-peter-schwenger-9780816679768","title":"At the Borders of Sleep","description":"At the Borders of Sleep is a unique exploration of the connections between literature and the liminal states between waking and sleeping—from falling asleep and waking up, to drowsiness and insomnia, to states in which sleeping and waking mix. Delving into philosophy as well as literature, Peter Schwenger investigates the threshold between waking and sleeping as an important and productive state between the forced march of rational thought and the oblivion of unconsciousness.  While examining literary representations of the various states between waking and sleeping, At the Borders of Sleep also analyzes how writers and readers alike draw on and enter into these states. To do so Schwenger reads a wide range of authors for whom the borders of sleep are crucial, including Marcel Proust, Stephen King, Paul Valéry, Fernando Pessoa, Franz Kafka, Giorgio de Chirico, Virginia Woolf, Philippe Sollers, and Robert Irwin. Considering drowsiness, insomnia, and waking up, he looks at such subjects as the hypnagogic state, the experience of reading and why it is different from full consciousness, the relationships between insomnia and writing and why insomnia is often a source of creative insight, and the persistence of liminal elements in waking thought. A final chapter focuses on literature that blurs dream and waking life, giving special attention to experimental writing.  Ultimately arguing that, taking place on the edges of consciousness, both the reading and writing of literature are liminal experiences, At the Borders of Sleep suggests new ways to think about the nature of literature and consciousness.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50029893091601,"sku":"GOR013841394","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0816679762.jpg?v=1769079464"},{"product_id":"letter-bomb-book-peter-schwenger-9780801844881","title":"Letter Bomb","description":"In a significant contribution to nuclear criticism, Schwenger explores the tensions between such writers as Derrida, Lancan and Bloch. Comparisons are made with literature that deals with the nuclear theme - works by Thomas Pynchon, Bernard Malamud, Tim O'Brien and others.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50045009395985,"sku":"GOR013844057","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0801844886.jpg?v=1750745630"},{"product_id":"fantasm-and-fiction-book-peter-schwenger-9780804734721","title":"Fantasm and Fiction","description":"Mental image, dream, fantasy, hallucination—all these are comprised in the psychoanalytic concept of the fantasm. Perhaps only such a multifarious concept is adequate to the range of visual elements involved in the experience of reading fiction, or of writing it. Soon after the birth of the novel, doctors expressed concern that readers might be possessed by what they were reading, haunted by textual fantasms. Contemporary writers like John Gardner, Maurice Blanchot, and John Banville figure this possession as a kind of textual dreaming: fiction, like dream, draws from a fantasmal unconscious.   For the reader's images to become conscious, however, they must be cued by a material text through framing strategies and evocative gaps. This book analyzes the complex relationship between the fantasmal experience and the material text, reading a wide range of works—such as Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, Coleridge's \"Kubla Khan,\" Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew, and Rimbaud's \"The Vowels\"—that treat explicitly what is implicit in reading.   Although the specific images of individual readers cannot be predicted, one can speculate on the modes of these images: are they focused or fogged, schematic or emotive, fleeting or enduring? These are questions not only for theorists but for artists who make textual visualization visible. Drawing on artists' books, marginal drawings by authors, and films such as Prospero's Books,  Fantasm and Fiction illuminates the process of textual visualization.   The author develops, in addition, \"A Politics of Visualization\" through analyses of the photographs of David Wojnarowicz, Derek Jarman's film Blue, and Nicole Brossard's novel Picture Theory. In this richly suggestive study, the fantasm emerges as a crucial aspect not only of reading but of any kind of envisioning.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51007533711633,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007536300305,"sku":"NIN9780804734721","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0804734720.jpg?v=1757414765"},{"product_id":"phallic-critiques-routledge-revivals-book-peter-schwenger-9781138830189","title":"Phallic Critiques (Routledge Revivals)","description":"Phallic Critiques, first published in 1984, is a study of ‘masculine’ styles of writing in the twentieth century – an age, according to Virginia Woolf, when ‘virility has become self-conscious’. Writers who carry macho values to their extreme often subscribe to the popular feeling that writing is an effeminate activity for a real man to be engaged in. Consequently they attempt to forge ‘masculine’ style of writing in an effort to redeem language from its sexually suspect nature. These styles reveal much about the ambiguous and paradoxical attitudes of men towards their own masculine role.   Peter Schwenger demonstrates the international nature of ‘masculine’ styles. His study ranges from such American authors as Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway and Philip Roth, to figures like Yukio Mishima, Alberto Moravia and Michel Leiris. This book should be of interest to students of literature.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52482296185105,"sku":"NLS9781138830189","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781138830189.jpg?v=1759853002"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/de-ch\/collections\/autor-buecher-von-peter-schwenger.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}