{"title":"Ross Posnock","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"philip-roth-s-rude-truth-book-ross-posnock-9780691116044","title":"Philip Roth's Rude Truth","description":"Has anyone ever worked harder and longer at being immature than Philip Roth? The novelist himself pointed out the paradox, saying that after establishing a reputation for maturity with two earnest novels, he \"worked hard and long and diligently\" to be frivolous - an effort that resulted in the notoriously immature Portnoy's Complaint (1969). Three-and-a-half decades and more than twenty books later, Roth is still at his serious \"pursuit of the unserious.\" But his art of immaturity has itself matured, developing surprising links with two traditions of immaturity - an American one that includes Emerson, Melville, and Henry James, and a late twentieth-century Eastern European one that developed in reaction to totalitarianism.In \"Philip Roth's Rude Truth\" - one of the first major studies of Roth's career as a whole - Ross Posnock examines Roth's \"mature immaturity\" in all its depth and richness. \"Philip Roth's Rude Truth\" will force readers to reconsider the narrow categories into which Roth has often been slotted - laureate of Newark, New Jersey; junior partner in the firm Salinger, Bellow, Mailer, and Malamud; and, Jewish-American regionalist. In dramatic contrast to these caricatures, the Roth who emerges from Posnock's readable and intellectually vibrant study is a great cosmopolitan in the tradition of Henry James and Milan Kundera.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49614280884497,"sku":"GOR002222027","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49809761468689,"sku":"CIN0691116040G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50356810940689,"sku":"CIN0691116040VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0691116040.jpg?v=1751008666"},{"product_id":"philip-roth-s-rude-truth-book-ross-posnock-9780691138435","title":"Philip Roth's Rude Truth","description":"Has anyone ever worked harder and longer at being immature than Philip Roth? The novelist himself pointed out the paradox, saying that after establishing a reputation for maturity with two earnest novels, he \"worked hard and long and diligently\" to be frivolous--an effort that resulted in the notoriously immature Portnoy's Complaint (1969). Three-and-a-half decades and more than twenty books later, Roth is still at his serious \"pursuit of the unserious.\" But his art of immaturity has itself matured, developing surprising links with two traditions of immaturity--an American one that includes Emerson, Melville, and Henry James, and a late twentieth-century Eastern European one that developed in reaction to totalitarianism. In Philip Roth's Rude Truth--one of the first major studies of Roth's career as a whole--Ross Posnock examines Roth's \"mature immaturity\" in all its depth and richness. Philip Roth's Rude Truth will force readers to reconsider the narrow categories into which Roth has often been slotted--laureate of Newark, New Jersey; junior partner in the firm Salinger, Bellow, Mailer, and Malamud; Jewish-American regionalist. In dramatic contrast to these caricatures, the Roth who emerges from Posnock's readable and intellectually vibrant study is a great cosmopolitan in the tradition of Henry James and Milan Kundera.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49801864577297,"sku":"CIN0691138435G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51405950353681,"sku":"GOR006533814","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0691138435.jpg?v=1750944534"},{"product_id":"renunciation-book-ross-posnock-9780674967830","title":"Renunciation","description":"Renunciation as a creative force in the careers of writers, philosophers, and artists is the animating idea behind Ross Posnock’s new book. Taking up acts of abandonment, rejection, and refusal that have long baffled critics, he shows how renunciation has reframed the relationship of artists and intellectuals to society in productive and unpredictable ways.  In a work of remarkable synthesis that includes traditions and genres from antiquity to postmodernity, Posnock discovers connections among disparate figures ranging from Lao Tzu to Dave Chappelle and Bob Dylan. The thread running through these acts of renunciation, he argues, is an aesthetic and ethical resistance to the demand that one’s words and actions be straightforward and immediately comprehensible. Modern art in particular valorizes the nonconceptual and the intuitive, seeking to make silence articulate and incompletion fertile.  Renouncers reject not only artistic and scholarly conventions but also the public roles that attend them. Wittgenstein, Rimbaud, and Glenn Gould brazenly flouted professional and popular expectations, demanding that philosophy, poetry, music play by new rules. Emerson and Nietzsche severed all institutional ties, while William James waged a guerrilla campaign from his post at Harvard against what all three considered to be the enemy: the pernicious philosophical insistence on rationality. Posnock also examines renunciations in light of World War II—the veterans J. D. Salinger and George Oppen, and the Holocaust survivor Paul Celan—while a fourth cluster includes the mystic Thomas Merton and the abstract painters Ad Reinhardt and Agnes Martin.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50360064508177,"sku":"CIN0674967836G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50886717833489,"sku":"NGR9780674967830","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51360024953105,"sku":"GOR013139696","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0674967836.jpg?v=1751262231"},{"product_id":"trial-of-curiosity-book-posnock-9780195071245","title":"The Trial of Curiosity","description":"In this important revisionist study, Posnock integrates literary and psychological criticism with social and cultural theory to make a major advance in our understanding of the life and thought of two great American figures, Henry and William James. Challenging canonical images of both brothers, Posnock is the first to place them in a rich web of cultural and intellectual affiliations comprised of a host of American and European theorists of modernity. A startlingly new Henry James emerges from a cross-disciplinary dialogue, which features Veblen, Santayana, Bourne, and Dewey, as well as Weber, Simmel, Benjamin, and Adorno.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50410156425489,"sku":"CIN0195071247VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52336565322001,"sku":"NLS9780195071245","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0195071247.jpg?v=1751005676"},{"product_id":"cambridge-companion-to-ralph-ellison-book-ross-posnock-9780521535069","title":"The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison","description":"Ralph Ellison's classic 1952 novel Invisible Man is one of the most important and controversial novels in the American canon and remains widely read and studied. This Companion provides an introduction to this influential and significant novelist and critic and to his masterpiece. It features essays by leading scholars, a chronology and a guide to further reading. The essays reveal alternative dimensions of Ellison's art radiating out from Invisible Man into other domains - technology, political theory, law, photography, music, religion - and recover the compelling urgency and relevance of Ellison's political and artistic vision. Since Ellison's death his published oeuvre has been expanded by several major volumes - his collected essays, the fragment of a novel, Juneteenth (1999), letters and short stories - examined here in the context of his life and work. Students and scholars of Ellison and of American and African-American literature will find this an invaluable and accessible guide.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51003128217873,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51003131560209,"sku":"NIN9780521535069","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51825554325777,"sku":"GOR014414011","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52134501482769,"sku":"NLS9780521535069","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0521535069.jpg?v=1751293900"},{"product_id":"cambridge-companion-to-ralph-ellison-book-ross-posnock-9780521827812","title":"The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison","description":"Ralph Ellison's classic 1952 novel Invisible Man is one of the most important and controversial novels in the American canon and remains widely read and studied. This Companion provides an introduction to this influential and significant novelist and critic and to his masterpiece. It features essays by leading scholars, a chronology and a guide to further reading. The essays reveal alternative dimensions of Ellison's art radiating out from Invisible Man into other domains - technology, political theory, law, photography, music, religion - and recover the compelling urgency and relevance of Ellison's political and artistic vision. Since Ellison's death his published oeuvre has been expanded by several major volumes - his collected essays, the fragment of a novel, Juneteenth (1999), letters and short stories - examined here in the context of his life and work. Students and scholars of Ellison and of American and African-American literature will find this an invaluable and accessible guide.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52138405396753,"sku":"NLS9780521827812","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780521827812.jpg?v=1757562651"},{"product_id":"color-and-culture-book-ross-posnock-9780674143098","title":"Color and Culture","description":"This text offers a historical perspective on black intellectuals as a social category, ranging over a century - from Frederick Douglass to Patricia Williams. They challenge the idea that high culture is white culture; and that racial uplift is the sole concern of the black intellectual.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53141035516177,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53141035942161,"sku":"CIN0674143094G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780674143098.jpg?v=1771521439"},{"product_id":"american-sophistication-book-ross-posnock-9780691177328","title":"American Sophistication","description":"The fascinating story of sophistication in the United States, from the founding to the present  Is there such a thing as “American sophistication”—or is it a contradiction in terms? Those questions have been up for grabs since America’s founding. The idea of sophistication has always left Americans uneasy. Devoted to a self-image of sincerity and plain-dealing, Americans are suspicious of sophistication’s playfulness and ease, which look like symptoms of European elitism, snobbery, and decadence. In this entertaining and enlightening account of American sophistication from the eighteenth century to today, Ross Posnock tells the story of how Americans’ anxiety about style and elegance led them to develop their own casual and cool style of sophistication.  From the start, American sophistication has been distinctive because it is mixed, improvised, and shape-shifting: guilty and smooth, game and nervous, vulgar and poised. Each chapter of this sparkling, wide-ranging narrative examines the evolution of American sophistication by exploring key figures in the story, including Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, Duke Ellington, Dorothy Parker, Mary McCarthy, the Kennedys, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Eartha Kitt, Susan Sontag, Frank O’Hara, Jasper Johns, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, and Leonard Bernstein. The book ends by sketching the changing fortunes of American sophistication since John F. Kennedy by looking at some of his key presidential successors—Reagan, Obama, and Trump.  The first account of a compelling and timely subject, American Sophistication brings together film, fashion, literature, design, art, and musical theater to present a fresh synthesis of cultural history.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53341446996241,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":53341447160081,"sku":"NGR9780691177328","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780691177328.jpg?v=1779185704"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/de-ch\/collections\/autor-buecher-von-ross-posnock.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}