We Need Your Input!! Please read and respond to the following wonderful initiative described here and headed by Greg Londe.
As part of the continuing renovation and awesome-ification project of the English Graduate Study Room in Firestone, we are in the process of recategorizing the books that currently spill over from the Scribner collection (all those SE # books) in a newly established library location unto themselves. We will also be buying books for this new location, and that’s where you all come in. Please suggest below books that you would like to see purchased for a non-circulating English Grad. collection. For this modest (to begin with) collection, we particularly have in mind books of criticism and theory that extend and supplement the now decades out-of-date Scribner collection: works that have made a major contribution to the field, that are cross-period to whatever extent possible, that appear regularly on exams reading lists or on syllabi, and/or that you just have regularly had difficulty finding. Of course, if you have suggestions that meet none of those criteria, it’ll still be valuable to consider them (primary texts? works of theory?). Feel free to post suggestions (as comments to this entry) as they occur to you, perhaps as paper writing season descends and flaws in the library’s holdings become more obnoxiously apparent. Once we have the long list, we’ll work on voting, narrowing, and all that.
I don’t know if these qualify as “always hard to come by” but they are definately nice to always have handy:
Hortense Spillers: Black White and in Color
Madu Dubey: Signs and Cities
ed Winston Napier: African American Literary Theory
Oh, also maybe some Adorno? “The Culture Industry” and “Notes to Literature”?
Hi, sorry I’m a little slow on the uptake. Here are my suggestions:
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Rules of Art”
Pascale Casanova, “The World Republic of Letters”
Franco Moretti, “The Novel”
Franco Moretti, “Graphs, Maps, Trees”
Raymond Williams, “Marxism and Literature”
Raymond Williams, “The Raymond Williams Reader”
Thanks!
Evan
This list looks wonderful…for theory I would just add Blanchot’s The Space of Literature.
Hooray for Greg and John L.
The theory list has been taken care of already — everything non-obscure that I’ve had trouble finding on the stacks is already here, and more. Here are a few extra works of criticism/literary history that I’ve consistently had trouble getting:
Woloch, _The One vs. the Many_
Watt, _The Rise of the Novel_
Nicholls, _Modernisms_
HOORAY! Thanks, Greg– and let Yaron and me know what we can as the project moves forward…
An update from John Logan! We got a place to put all these books, and a library willing to help us buy them.
“Dear Greg,
We now have a new Main Catalog location for B-9-J. It’s EGSR. The
head of Firestone Circulation Services wanted something that was
clearly different from SE, so I went with the simplest solution.
Books now permanently shelved in the Graduate Study Room will be
transferred from SE to EGSR, and any books we acquire for the
collection you had in mind will also have that location. Books in the
EGSR location will not circulate. So let me know your desiderata and
we’ll order them.”
I’d second most everything said so far, and suggest as well:
Bataille: The Accursed Share
Jameson: Prison-House of Language, Political Unconscious
A set of the most recent Cambridge Histories of various period literatures
Grover goes to the Museum of Everything
Great list so far! Here’s a few more:
Habermas: Toward a Rational Society
Frances Yates: Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition; The Art of Memory
Deleuze: Cinema 1 & 2; Negotiations
And I’ll second anything by Barthes, Jameson, Raymond Williams, Agamben, Bourdieu, Foucault.
A couple more:
Bourdieu: Distinction, Homo Academicus, Outline of a Theory of Practice
Guillory: Cultural Capital
Ranciere: The Politics of Aesthetics
Agamben: Homo Sacer, Potentialities, State of Exception
Habermas: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
Warner: The Trouble with Normal, Publics and Counterpublics
Berlant: Anatomy of a National Fantasy, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, The Female Complaint
Some of these are temporarily shelved in reading rooms, one is available as an electronic resource (Potentialities, I think), and one is in another study room (Religion has Outline of a Theory of Practice)
Theory:
To add to what’s already been said, major works by Raymond Williams,Frederic Jameson, Gayatri Spivak, Stephen Greenblatt and Edward Said would be useful to have on hand in Firestone.
Also on the wish list (if slightly more esoteric):
Bachelard, Poetics of Space
de Certeau, Politics of Everyday Life
Levebvre, The Production of Space
Lit Stuff:
Denning, Cultural Front
Douglas, Terrible Honesty
Edwards, Practice of Diaspora
Amy Kaplan
Also, it would be nice to have a selection of Cambridge Companions to literature-related stuff as general reference in there.
I got some! I got some!
De Man: Allegories of Reading
Derrida: Acts of Literature
I’d like to add:
Benn Michaels: The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism
Posnock: Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual
Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality and Drama by Martin Puchner
Rethinking Tragedy, Rita Felski, ed.
All the new volumes of Walter Benjamin translations and The Arcades Project
Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom
Anne Cheng, The Melancholy of Race
Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance
Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism
Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason
Theatre/Theory/Theatre: The Major Critical Texts from Aristotle and Zeami to Soyinka and Havel (ed. Daniel Gerould)
Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will; Illness as Metaphor; On Photography
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, S/Z
Edward Said, Orientalism
Amen to everything Sarah said, esp. about the Bhabha.
Some (admittedly Americanist) staples:
Lott: Love and Theft
Bercovitch: American Jeremiad
Roach: Cities of the Dead
Levine: Highbrow, Lowbrow
Hartman: Scenes of Subjection
Fetterley: The Resisting Reader
Gilroy: Black Atlantic
Dimock: Through Other Continents
Benn Michaels: Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism
Takaki: Iron Cages
Sundquist: To Wake the Nations
The Language of Psychoanalysis by Laplanche and Pontalis is a rare but useful thing.
Here are a few that I can never get my hands on:
Freud Reader, Ed. Peter Gay
Marx Reader, Ed. Tucker
Foucault: The Order of Things and History of Sexuality
DuBois: Souls of Black Folk
Hegel: Phenomenology
Butler: Bodies That Matter and/or Gender Trouble
Bhabha: Location of Culture