How did the Virgin Mary, about whom very little is said in the Gospels, become one of the most powerful and complex religious figures in the world? To arrive at the answers to this far-reaching question, one of our foremost medieval historians, Miri Rubin, investigates the ideas, practices, and images that have developed around the figure of Mary from the earliest decades of Christianity to around the year 1600. Drawing on an extraordinarily wide range of sources—including music, poetry, theology, art, scripture, and miracle tales—Rubin reveals how Mary became so embedded in our culture that it is impossible to conceive of Western history without her. In her rise to global prominence, Mary was continually remade and reimagined by wave after wave of devotees. Rubin shows how early Christians endowed Mary with a fine ancestry; why in early medieval Europe her roles as mother, bride, and companion came to the fore; and how the focus later shifted to her humanity and unparalleled purity. She also explores how indigenous people in Central America, Africa, and Asia remade Mary and so fit her into their own cultures. Beautifully written and finely illustrated, this book is a triumph of sympathy and intelligence. It demonstrates Mary’s endless capacity to inspire and her profound presence in Christian cultures and beyond.

Edward Hopper's paintings are icons of American culture. His representations of gas stations, storefronts, cafeterias and hotel rooms embody the solitude of travel and adult life in the America of the thirties, forties and fifties. Because of the familiarity of his subject matter, Hopper has been pigeon-holed both historically, as an American realist, and thematically, as an artist of alienation. Mark Strand, recent poet laureate and writer of many books of award-winning poetry, approaches Hopper's work with a fresh eye, exploring the aesthetic principles behind the paintings. Strand, whose poems move through a terrain similar to that portrayed by Hopper, possesses a unique and powerful understanding of what makes the paintings so moving and memorable. He writes with his distinctive clarity and grace, examining twenty-three of Hopper's most important works. He cites aesthetic reasons for Hopper's continuing ability to deeply move people in an America that has grown considerably more complex both politically and socially since mid-century.

"Yelchin delivers a darkly humorous slice-of-life account of growing up in the Soviet Union. . . . Humorous, heartbreaking, and ultimately hopeful." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Drama, family secrets, and a KGB spy in his own kitchen! How will Yevgeny ever fulfill his parents' dream that he become a national hero when he doesn't even have his own room? He's not a star athlete or a legendary ballet dancer. In the tiny apartment he shares with his Baryshnikov-obsessed mother, poetry-loving father, continually outraged grandmother, and safely talented brother, all Yevgeny has is his little pencil, the underside of a massive table, and the doodles that could change everything. With equal amounts charm and solemnity, award-winning author and artist Eugene Yelchin recounts in hilarious detail his childhood in Cold War Russia as a young boy desperate to understand his place in his family.

This volume presents an introduction to surrealism. The lively young artists of the Surrealist Movement shocked Paris in the 1920s with the first strong statement of many tendencies that still drive the avant-garde today. They centered art in the artist's identity while including spectators in the act of creation; denied distinctions between life and art, sense and nonsense; and conceived not only drama and film, but also painting, poetry, and music as theatrical performance. Surrealist works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works being an artifact. Surrealist theater depicts the subconscious experience, moody tone and disjointed structure, sometimes imposing a unifying idea.

Surveys the life and work of the artist, and discusses the influence of his Russian village childhood on his art

Leo Stein (1872-1947) was an influential art collector and critic. It has been Stein's ironic fate to be referred to as "Gertrude's brother," ironic as for many years he was her mentor and counsellor. Appreciation: Painting, Poetry and Prose is a model of lucidity, wisdom and classical simplicity. It ranges over a wide field of thought and criticism. Leo Stein's judgements on art and literature are crisp, perceptive and original. His approach to his subject is casual, anecdotal and, though often sharp and biting, finally mellow. Reading this book is like that rare experience of listening, enchanted, for an evening to a great conversationalist, a man informed and urbane, witty and wise.

A sensational success when first published in 1893, the violent hatreds Degeneration roused among younger artists followed the author for the rest of his life. The book pursues a medicalised examination of some of the literary and artistic movements of the period. However, though taking inspiration from Cesare Lombroso's examination of genius and insanity, and to a lesser degree of criminal man, Nordau's language is anything but scientific. Rude and acerbic in tone, the author's sceptical disdain for his targets results in a vitriolic, vituperative, and systematic ripping to pieces of the prose, poetry, plays, and operatic works selected for analysis. One truly gets the sense of a middle-aged critic, seated on a leather armchair, looking down his nose at the works he is unable to enjoy. Nevertheless, he is not devoid of insight, and his criticisms are salutary when the targets have since become renowned philosophers, authors, or composers of the first rank. Why is it not surprising that such a book would inspire an embittered misanthrope, and later Stalinist, like György Lukács? According to Nordau's biographer, Degeneration caused an explosion of criticisms in Germany, to which followed a chain of explosions throughout Europe each time the work appeared in translation. Driven by utopian visions, Nordau stuck to his guns, but came in the end to regret going after some authors-like Zola-in the way that he did. Having pathologised him, the latter Nordau came to respect, and Zola bore him no umbrage. Others were, of course, less generous, and modern critics slate him for establishing the theory of degenerate art. Despite its bulk, Degeneration is written with clarity and precision, and proves an enormously entertaining read.

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Film. Jewish Studies. Edited by Julian Kabza. Translated by Ian Thompson, Anna O'Meara, Julian Kabza, Nadege LeJeune, and Charles Penwarden. Introduction by Adrian Martin. Forward by Frédérique Devaux. Interview with Isou by Roland Sabatier. Afterword by Erik Bullot. "Who is Isou? Some may know that he was the founder and leader of a movement in art and thought named Lettrism. Some may know the remarkable film he made a year before he wrote his manifesto, the Treatise on Slime and Eternity, a breakthrough work of feature-length experimentation that was to win fans including Stan Brakhage--Isou himself would coldly remark, many years later, that Jean-Luc Godard and Guy Debord (to name only two luminaries whom he considered his mortal enemies) stole everything from it. Some might have come to the legend of Isou through the fond passage devoted to him in Greil Marcus' book on the distant origins of punk, Lipstick Traces--a book whose subtitle evokes 'a secret history of the 20th century.' In that book, Marcus tells the fine story of his teenage niece stumbling upon the photos on his desk of a young Isou in the late 1940s, and mistaking the artist for a contemporary pop star. And Isou did indeed look the part--especially in a self-portrait which was an example of what the Lettrists called hypergraphics, a work mixing the media of photography, painting, drawing, and Lettrist poetry."--Adrian Martin, from the introduction "Isou chipped language down to the bone that it might build its flesh up again, fresh and new. It is one of the grand aesthetic visions of the late twentieth century. His cinema, in particular, is a marvelous document of the secret history of our times. Here at last is the book that, for Anglophone readers and beyond, cements his fleeting presence for all time."--McKenzie Wark "Long-overdue, this translation of Isou's masterpiece--together with its contextual essays and interviews by Martin, Devaux, Sabatier, and Bullot--will be a monumental resource for international research into the origins of the Lettrist movement along with postwar Experimental Film and Media Art."--Andrew V. Uroskie

The 9th Series of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document initiative includes titles by Jim Schoppert, Jacques Viau Renaud, Lucia Berlin, Sargon Boulos, and selections from KULCHUR.

Wallace Berman (1926-1976) was the quintessential artist of the Californian counterculture, connecting the disparate artistic, literary, music and film scenes of Los Angeles and San Francisco with his pioneering mail-art magazine Semina . Published between 1955 and 1964 in editions ranging from 150 to 350 copies, and hand-printed on a tabletop at Berman's house, Semina was sent through the mail to his friends, to the contributors and to those he admired. Among its many contributors were Charles Brittin, Jean Cocteau, Walter Hopps, Cameron, Michael McClure, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners, Robert Duncan and Berman himself. With its loose-leaf poetry, collages and photography, the magazine has become a defining document of its period (particularly since the 2006 traveling exhibition Semina Culture ) and now sells for thousands of dollars. This volume allows itsentire contents to be seen for the first time, reproducing every component of every issue of the magazine in full color. Published in collaboration with the Berman family and Berman's gallerist Michael Kohn, it also includes commentary and essays by friends, admirers and family in a laid-in pamphlet.

Kenneth Goldsmith's Theory offers an unprecedented reading of the contemporary world: 500 texts – from poems and musings to short stories – printed on 500 pages assembled in the form of a ream of paper. Curated by the author-poet, this unique collection maps out the various issues and trends in contemporary literature in a world currently being shaken up by everything online and digital,and calls for the reinvention of creative forms.

This Poem is an ironic investigation of contemporary culture and the technomediatic-saturated world we are enmeshed in. Composed in the style of Facebook updates and extended tweets, each section infuses itself with continuously shifting tones, styles, and commentary which in turn are provocative, emotive, and deeply satiric. Mashing up lexicons of Stein, Zukofsky, Shakespeare, Whitman, the recent financial meltdown, semiotic theory, Lady Gaga, Derrida, and Flickr streams, This Poem is a self-reflexive romp through shards and fragments of post-consumerist culture.

A magisterial exploration of poetry’s place in the fine arts by one of the twentieth century's leading poets In this book, eminent poet Anthony Hecht explores the art of poetry and its relationship to the other fine arts. While the problems he treats entail both philosophic and theoretical discussion, he never allows abstract speculation to overshadow his delight in the written texts that he introduces, or in the specific examples of painting and music to which he refers. After discussing literature’s links with painting and music, Hecht investigates the theme of paradise and wilderness, especially in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He then turns to the question of public and private art, exploring the ways in which all the arts participate in balances between private and public modes of discourse, and between an exclusive or elitist role and the openly political. Beginning with a discussion of architecture as an illustration of a more general theme of discord and balance, the penultimate lecture probes the inner contradictions of works of art and our reactions to them, while the final piece concerns art and morality.

Allen Ginsberg was a serious shutterbug who delighted in taking candid snapshots of friends and fellow writers, but up until now readers have had little chance to consider the "poetic" world of his photographs. Here in the form of twenty detachable postcards are photographs taken over the years on the poet's many travels and trips abroad. Pictures include: Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Corso in Mexico; Burroughs and Bowles in Tangier; Snyder in Japan; Whalen and Creeley in Vancouver; Ginsberg in India and Prague, and Philip Glass in Turkey. Allen Ginsberg was born in 1926 in Newark, New Jersey. In 1956 City Lights published his signal poem "Howl," one of the most widely read poems of the era. He died in 1997. Also Available from City Lights Postcards from the Underground TP $8.95, 0-87286-365-4 bu CUSA

What, if any, is the relationship between Charles Dickens and the decorative arts? Between Henry James and Art Nouveau? Between the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and the paintings of the Impressionists? Recent trends in scholarship have begun to reassess the assumption that the arts of painting and literature are too fundamentally disparate to permit a fruitful comparison between the two. In Victorian Contexts, Murray Roston puts that assumption to rest with imaginative and refreshing essays on the similarities and shared themes of the literature, painting, architecture, and crafts of the nineteenth century. Explaining the value of such an intertextual approach, he argues that in every generation there is a central complex of inherited assumptions and urgent contemporary concerns to which each creative artist responds in his or her individual way. Eminently readable, Victorian Contexts is accessible to general readers as well as scholars of literature, the visual arts, and nineteenth-century culture.

This magnificent book is a gallery of words and images that celebrates the sister arts of poetry and painting. John Hollander, the eminent poet and critic, has selected more than fifty works of art—paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, and sculptures from antiquity to the present—and matched them to poems that address the same images in their verses. The result is an illuminating and ingeniously organized chronicle of words and images in conversation, as well as a powerful introduction to how, across Western culture, great writers have been inspired by pictures. The Gazer's Spirit focuses on leading examples of ecphrastic poetry, or poems that directly confront particular works of art. Hollander, who is one of the most distinguished contemporary practitioners of the ecphrastic tradition, has crafted a survey of enormous range, taste, and depth, from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. The heart of the book is its gallery of poems and images set side by side. There are poems whose presence in this book is all but inevitable, such as Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" paired with Breugel the Elder's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus , and delightful surprises, such as Edith Wharton's sonnet that casts fresh light on Leonardo's Mona Lisa . Here are Robert Browning and Michelangelo; Walt Whitman and George Inness; and Randall Jarrell and Albrecht Dürer writing and drawing about The Knight, Death and the Devil. Among the poets are many visually sophisticated writers such as James Merrill, Richard Howard, Marianne Moore, and Richard Wilbur; the visual objects in the book are both celebrated and obscure, as various as a Greek sculplture, a medieval tapestry, a famous Renoir, or a fountain by an anonymous architect. In some cases, obvious affinities, such as a poem by Vicki Hearne on a white horse by Gauguin, produce unexpected poetic results.

Aram Saroyan's "minimal" poems of the 1960s demonstrated a completely unprecedented handling of words--often single words--that combined astounding economy with palpable textural warmth. Untitled poems that read in their entirety "eyeye" and "lobstee" evinced a pleasure in words that everybody could recognize--except Senator Jesse Helms, who publicly objected to Saroyan's poem "lighght" when its author received an NEA award--but which nobody else (except perhaps Gertrude Stein) had quite nailed until Aram Saroyan came along. In every one of Saroyan's page acts, the sound of typewriter keys inscribing blank paper are as audible to the mind's ear as the words themselves. Coffee Coffee was published as a mimeograph edition by Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer's 0 To 9 imprint in 1967, and was one of Saroyan's earliest collections, containing such gems as "guarantee," "added" and "rinse." Acconci has since recorded his admiration for these works: "In the late sixties, when I called myself a poet, Aram was the poet I envied."