Excessive Narratives & U Chan Tsola’ni Ek Balam by Robert John Brocklehurst

Paperback: (Second Edition available April 2009) £9.95

Excessive Narratives:

Georges Bataille, Self-Sacrifice & The Communal Language of the Yucatec Maya

This essay is based on Georges Bataille’s 1930s cultural theory of 'general economy' which presented modern living as problematic for societies that attempt to survive as a construct of multiple ‘sovereign selves’ expending themselves as useful in an overarching edict of economy (Bataille, 1949). However, the descendents of Late Formative Mayan culture (300BC-100AD) live according to ‘other’ narratives recognizing that a more ‘useful’ objective loss of self is to be found in the unconscious revelations of language and ritual performance. Self-sacrifice is beneficial to cross-communal relations when the sovereign self released in memorial moments facilitates a better understanding of our place in larger world and cosmic orders (Hendon 1999, Joyce, 2003).

U Chan Tsola’ni Ek Balam (The Short Story of The Black Cat)

Written from travel experiences in Southeast Mexico, this humorous Mexican ‘memory play’ explores language alterity and the roles nature and myth play in understanding the misunderstandings of the ‘indigenous Maya’. The story is of a respected academic who travels to Mexico in search of the Cult of the Black Cat. Told in English, Yucatec Mayan and poor Spanish, the play is structured according to the everyday language of the Yucatec Maya where performing a triumvirate of ‘teller, respondent and audience’ allows physiocratic meanings to appear through acts of ‘inactive witnessing’.

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Robert John Brocklehurst (PGD in Video Production, Bournemouth University; BA Hons, Fine Art, Winchester School of Art; MA in Cultural Memory, University of London)

Bob Brocklehurst is a  lecturer in Technical Theatre. He is currently conducting research at The School of Advanced Study, London, focussing on the relation between visual language and communal memory within Yucatec Mayan communities, Central Yucatan, Mexico. He has also worked as both a visiting lecturer and filmmaker abroad in California, Bosnia Herzegovina and Ghana, West Africa.

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Muse & Messiah: The Life, Imagination & Legacy of Bruno Schulz (1892 – 1942) by  Brian R. Banks

Paperback: Second Edition available April 2009 (£13.95)
Hardback: (Out of Print)

Muse & Messiah is the first full comparative study of the Polish-Jewish writer and artist Bruno Schulz (1892-1942), based on the latest materials including new interviews with ex-students and biographers, Polish texts, plus all worldwide English studies and influenced works. Rare photographs, detailed chronology, and recent images are included for comparison.

His life and themes are examined with detailed Polish and European influences. New, first-hand corrected information about his home region adds a new dimension to his creative world within contemporary Polish-Jewish tensions.  Controversial international debates about his last works are brought up to date in a work that seeks to place his poetic-artistic achievement more centrally to highlight an original, modernist and yet universal vision.

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Brian R. Banks began writing as a prelude to living on the London streets, in the Francis Thompson rather than Orwellian mode. Huysmans’ A Rebours focused a five-year study of that author's life at the British Museum aided by transcripted notebooks and the generous help of Prof. Colin Burns.

Occasional articles, reviews and two private poetry collections were published, then The Image of J.-K. Huysmans (1990, New York). This period coincided with the finding of a true muse and running a bookshop. A few years later  Muse & Messiah: The Life, Imagination & Legacy of Bruno Schulz was written, in tandem with a book of essays, aided not by grants but personal assistance given without financial interest in Poland, Ukraine, and Czech Republic. The author currently lives somewhere in Central Europe.

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Fragmentary Futures: Blanchot, Beckett, Coetzee by Daniel Watt

June 2007

Paperback: (Second Edition available April 2009) £11.95

Romanticism elaborates a model of fragmentation, different from the fragment as ruined part of a totality from which it is shorn. Rodolphe Gasché argues that the concept of the Romantic fragment would have to be ‘radically recast’ to be applied to contemporary literature. It is via Maurice Blanchot that the fragment is ‘recast’ into an event in which ‘all literature is the fragment’. This book investigates that turn, exploring its implications in the work of  Blanchot, Samuel Beckett and J. M. Coetzee. Blanchot’s ‘recast’ fragment demands that literature become fragmentary whether it carries the form of the fragment or not.

Beckett’s prose work unfolds a part of fragmentary writing that appears to be degenerative, as words collide and syntactic structures are eroded. However, fragmentary writing allows the presentation of a damaged work, one under the threat of abandonment, as work in progress; being neither finished nor continued.

The work of Coetzee demonstrates the fragment’s relation to Levinasian ethics, inviting a responsiveness to the ‘other’: a situation that maintains the singularity of the work without reducing it to particular critical positions. The legacy of the fragment remains as much a responsibility for modern literature as for the event of the German Romantic fragment. Fragmentary Futures argues that the fragment points to an impossibility governing the generation of literature itself. The German Romantic fragment is still to come, haunting literature. The ‘recast’ fragment does not exorcise such a revenant but makes its future appearance more fascinating.

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Dr Daniel Watt is a Lecturer in English and Drama. His research interests include philosophical and literary influences on theatre and performance in the twentieth century, particularly the work of Samuel Beckett and Tadeusz Kantor. His other research work is focused on literature and ethics, fragmentary writing, and the nature of the puppet, or abject object, in performance.

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Student-Centred: Education, Freedom and the Idea of Audience by Neil Cocks

April 2009

Paperback, 246pp, £13.95

Debates around education tend to be constructed through a series of oppositions, the student-centred against the didactic, the innovative against the traditional, the free against the controlled. Rather than attempting to resolve such conflicts, this book analyses the extent to which the various sides can be read as sharing a range of assumptions about pedagogical purpose and process.  In charting the various ways in which the student’s desires are claimed to be known, its independence guaranteed, and its growth optimised, the book makes a plea for the role of close textual analysis in any engagement with educational discourse.  It is argued that until the student is read as a construction, rather than observed as a fact, the various sides in education theory will not be able to address the consensus their work is dependent upon.

Dr Neil Cocks is a Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Reading.

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Works of Illness: Narrative, Picturing and the Social Response to Serious Disease by Alan Radley

October 2009

Paperback, 242pp, £13.95

Works of Illness takes a fresh look at illness by examining the role of artworks in the understanding of and response to serious disease. The special contribution of this book is to focus upon pictures, narratives and dramatic performance as ways of giving shape to illness experience, communicating this to others, and influencing social action in order to mitigate suffering. It shows how the aesthetic dimension of such representations is key to understanding the relationship of the world of illness to that of health. Works of Illness is an original interdisciplinary study that draws upon medical sociology, the philosophy of art, and discussions of ethics to offer a new theory of how serious illness is made social.

Alan Radley is Professor of Social Psychology in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University, UK. He is Founding Editor of the journal health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine.

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Maciej Korbowa and Bellatrix by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz

Translated and Introduced
by Daniel Gerould

September 2009

Paperback, 104pp, £9.95

Witkacy’s first play, written in 1918 following his four years of service as a Tsarist officer, Maciej Korbowa and Bellatrix portrays the disintegration of the Russian empire and the coming of revolution seen as a theatrical spectacle. A psychotic guru known as the Master, Maciej Korbowa, aided by his gender-shifting alter-ego Bellatrix, presides over a secret club of disciples addicted to drugs, alcohol, and sado-masochistic orgies and leads this band of metaphysical desperados and decadent artists no longer able to create on a philosophical quest for absolute Nothingness—until he finally betrays them all to the revolutionary Sailors of Death. This strange and haunting drama, bursting with violence, rage, and anguish, is a seminal work for understanding Witkacy, who frequently returns to its characters and themes in creating his later works.

Daniel Gerould is Lucille Lortel Distinguished Professor of Theatre and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and director of publications at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. He is editor of ‘Slavic and East European Performance’ and of the twelve-volume Routledge/Harwood Polish and Eastern European Theatre Archive. He has translated the plays of Witkiewicz and written about twentieth-century avant-garde drama and theatre. His books include Witkacy: A Study of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz as an Imaginative Writer, The Witkiewicz Reader, and The Guillotine: Its Legend and Lore. He has edited Theatre/Theory/Theatre: The Major Critical Texts from Aristotle and Zeami to Soyinka and Havel and several anthologies, including American Melodrama and Symbolist Drama. His play Candaules Commissioner has been performed in France, Germany, and America.

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