Columbia University Press

We were delighted and pleasantly surprised to see that James Franco, the actor, writer, and doctoral candidate (among other things), recently featured a photo of Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age by Kenneth Goldsmith on his website. Below the photo he simply wrote “Good,” which we’ll take as an endorsement!

This of course is the second celebrity sighting related to Uncreative Writing:

*We make no claims about the veracity or circumstances of this photograph!

“[Translators] are witnesses, with tales to tell. We are writers, with our own voices. Whenever we see literary culture distorted for political advantage, it matters very much that we speak.”—Maureen Freely, from “Misreading Orhan Pamuk”

In her essay “Misreading Orhan Pamuk,” from In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, Maureen Freely discusses translating the works of Pamuk and how her role as translator changed after Pamuk became embroiled in a political controversy. In this excerpt, Freely considers the importance of the translator in contextualizing as well as defending the work of an author:

When Snow went out into the world, I again revised my job description. A translator did not just need to find the right words, stay in close conversation with the author, and run interference for him as the book made its way through the publication process. She also had to do everything she could to contextualize the book for readers who were not familiar with Turkey—not inside the text but outside it, in journals and newspapers, and at conferences, symposia, literature festivals, and a long sequence of very frustrating dinner parties. As I made the rounds, I was at first encouraged by those who said to me, “I knew nothing about Turkey until I read Snow, you know, but now I can see it’s a really fascinating country so I’d like to know more about it.” I thought the most important thing was that they were interested. Only good could come of that, I thought.

I was wrong.

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“Translation is, in a sense, the slowest possible reading. You’re watching the great writer build a story arc, and you’re watching sentence by sentence how that arc is being shaped. In that sense it slows down your reading and studying of an author.”—Susan Bernofsky

In a recent interview with Words Without Borders, Susan Bernofsky, coeditor with Esther Allen of In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, discussed her own practice as a translator as well as a variety of other issues related to translation. Among other topics, Bernofsky talks about “stealth gloss,” whether or not to “domesticate” translations, whether it is better to translate a text by a dead or a living author, and what book she views as the “holy grail” of translation:

Here’s an excerpt from the interview (Shaun Randol (SR) is the interviewer for Words Without Borders. You can read the full interview here):

SR: Ultimately do you think translating makes one a better writer?

SB: Yes I do, because it makes you think consciously about how sentences are put together, about the actual techniques the writer used to make this sentence have this effect. Translating makes you really conscious of the richness of synonyms out there as well as sentence structure. I constantly hear from students about how translating has changed how they approach their own fiction.

Translation is, in a sense, the slowest possible reading. You’re watching the great writer build a story arc, and you’re watching sentence by sentence how that arc is being shaped. In that sense it slows down your reading and studying of an author.

SR: Would you prefer it if we all spoke one language?

SB: No, because we think differently in different languages. To take away the multiplicity of languages is to take away difference, and difference is interesting. It would be bland and boring if everyone spoke the same language. The literary output that we produce would also be much more monotonous.

SR: Does translation into English enhance English language supremacy or does it preserve language plurality by allowing writers to use their own languages?

SB: The latter. You already have the phenomenon of writers trying to write straight in English so as to have direct access to that global market, but I think that when we translate foreign literature we are creating interest in the foreign culture, thereby also the foreign language.

“To say of translation—as is so often said—that ‘the original meaning is always lost’ is to deny the history of literature and the ability of any text to be enriched by the new meanings that are engendered as it enters new contexts—that is, as it remains alive and is read anew.”—Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky

In their introduction to In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky explore the importance and complexities of translation in a world where English is becoming increasingly dominant. Below in an excerpt from their introduction, “A Culture of Translation”:

Today, the English-language translator occupies a particularly com­plex ethical position. To translate is to negotiate a fraught matrix of in­teractions. As a writer of the language of global power, the translator into English must remain ever aware of the power differential that tends to subsume cultural difference and subordinate it to a globally uniform, market-oriented monoculture. Weltliteratur is no longer (and may never have been) politically, culturally, or ethically neutral. At the same time, the failure to translate into English, the absence of translation, is clearly the most effective way of all to consolidate the global monoculture and exclude those who write and read in other languages from the far-reach­ing global conversation for which English is increasingly the vehicle.

Nevertheless, contemporary discussions of translation’s role— particularly in the English-speaking world—sometimes attest to a stance that barely differs from that of Dante’s Virgil, mourning for a lost prelapsarian oneness and concomitant frustration with the affliction of linguistic diversity. This attitude, as David Bellos observes, portrays translation as little more than “a compensatory strategy designed only to cope with a state of affairs that falls far short of the ideal.” All transla­tion, in this view, is invariably an inadequate substitute for an original text that can only be legitimately apprehended in the purity of its origi­nal language.

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“To fully grasp its essence, I had to plunge into its heart—then and only then could his writing burst into bloom.”—Haruki Murakami on translating The Great Gatsby

In the Translator’s Afterword, Haruki Murakami’s essay in In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, the novelist discusses the challenges he confronted when translating The Great Gatsby into Japanese. The novel is one of Murakami’s favorite (and apparently it’s being made into a movie….)

To the best of my recollection, I was in my late thirties when I started telling people I was going to translate The Great Gatsby when I turned sixty. Having made that pronouncement, I then conducted my daily af­fairs as if I were moving toward that .xed point, so that much of what I did was pushed along by a kind of reverse calculation. Metaphorically speaking, I had placed Gatsby securely on my kamidana, the high shelf that serves as a household shrine to the Shinto gods, and then lived my life glancing up at it from time to time.

For some strange reason, however, it became harder and harder to wait till my sixtieth birthday. Restlessly, my eyes sought the book in the shrine more and more often until I finally had to give in. So, three years ahead of schedule, I sat down to work on this translation. Initially I told myself that I would just pick away at it in my spare time, but once I got going I found I couldn’t stop, and I finished the whole translation with unanticipated speed, in a single burst of energy. I was like the impatient child who can’t wait until his birthday to open his presents. This ten­dency to jump the gun never seems to change, no matter how old I get….

In the case of The Great Gatsby, I found that none of the translations I looked at satisfied me, regardless of their quality. Inevitably, I would think, This feels a bit (or a lot!) different from the Gatsby I know. I must has­ten to add that this reaction was personal, based on the image I carried in my mind, and had nothing at all to do with objective—or academic— critical assessments of the works at hand, such evaluations being beyond my power anyway. All I could do was scratch my head at how wide the gap was between “my Gatsby” and the impression I received from the translations—this again from a purely subjective perspective. I don’t nor­mally discuss my reactions to others’ work so frankly. But this is The Great Gatsby we are talking about, so I am willing to stick my neck out.

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This week our featured book is In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, Edited by Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky.

Throughout the week, we will be featuring the books and their editors on our blog as well as on our Twitter feed, and on our Facebook page.

We are also offering a FREE copy of In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means (For more on the book, you can read Haruki Murakami on translating The Great Gatsby.

To enter our Book Giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and preferred mailing address. We will randomly select one winner on May 10 at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

“The essays in In Translation, exploring both the larger, complex questions of translation’s role and function in the world of literature and the more detailed, word by word dilemmas faced by every translator, are consistently stimulating, engaging, and eye-opening, not to speak of eloquent and occasionally even dramatic and/or funny — I came away from reading them with a host of new ideas and insights. This collection is a valuable addition to any library of books on translation or literature in general.” — Lydia Davis

“When we feel powerfully moved by what words do to us, I think it’s because we’ve entered into some deeper, older part of us, a place of wisdom and wholeness that is preverbal, even prehuman.”—Christopher Collins

The following is an interview with Christopher Collins, author of Paleopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination

Question: Let’s start with your title: what do you mean by “Paleopoetics”?

Christopher Collins: All my life I’ve been involved with thinking about, talking about, and writing about literature. But through all those years what most intrigued me were the feelings—the moods and emotions—and the mental images that words can invoke. My deepest responses to poems, dramas, novels—any artwork made up of words—always seemed to come from a level in me that somehow went far back into the past. I don’t mean past lifetimes or anything like that—just a very deep and ancient genetic past, some part of me that wasn’t derived from my personal experience. When we feel powerfully moved by what words do to us, I think it’s because we’ve entered into some deeper, older part of us, a place of wisdom and wholeness that is preverbal, even prehuman. In writing this book I’ve tried to find insight into these intuitions by studying what the sciences of the mind/brain have to say about memory, emotion, perception, and the simulation of perception, imagination.

Q: Is that how you arrived at your subtitle, “the evolution of the preliterate imagination?”

CC: Yes, but by imagination I don’t mean foresight or mental agility, but rather the simulation of perception, auditory, kinetic, and, above all, visual imagery. For me, mental imagery is the prelinguistic content that language was evolved to communicate and that writing was eventually invented to disseminate.

Q: How can anyone know how humans thought before they were able to write down their thoughts?

CC: That’s a fair question. We need to approach this from many angles, for example, primate social behavior, the evolving architecture of the brain from pre-human to human, its consequences for the perceptual systems of vision and hearing, the semiotics of gestures, eye–hand coordination and tool use, and the implication of these for fully human social behavior. We need to look for converging evidence from many disciplines—from paleontology, ethology, anthropology, developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, and neuroscience. We need to ponder the implications of our reading, let us take us with it, and not be afraid to revise our basic assumptions. Then, if and when concepts seem to click into place, we need to be ready to draw inferences.

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Columbia University Press has had the privilege of publishing two volumes of critical essays by the poet and critic William Logan, Our Savage Age: Poetry and the Civil Tongue and The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin. As a critic, Logan is perhaps best known for his sharp wit and his willingness to express dissatisfaction with a poet or a volume of poetry.

Last Friday, we posted a twelve-question quiz. We collected twelve quotes by Logan about twelve different poets, removed the poets’ names, and asked readers to guess which poet Logan was talking about in each. Here are the correct answers:

1. Maxine Kumin

2. Sylvia Plath

3. Anne Carson

4. Billy Collins

5. Robert Frost

6. Hart Crane

7. Ted Kooser

8. Robert Hass

9. Geoffrey Hill

10. Sharon Olds

11. Robert Pinsky

12. Elizabeth Spires

Thanks to all those who participated! We had an impressive number of people get all twelve answers! We’ll be randomly selecting our winner from that group and notifying that person via email.

Today is the final day of our week-long focus on poetry (today is also the final day of our National Poetry Month book giveaway; be sure to enter by 1 PM today for a chance to win six excellent volumes of poetry!), and we thought we would finish our poetry week with a fun quiz! Columbia University Press has had the privilege of publishing two volumes of critical essays by the poet and critic William Logan, Our Savage Age: Poetry and the Civil Tongue and The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin. As a critic, Logan is perhaps best known for his sharp wit and his willingness to express dissatisfaction with a poet or a volume of poetry.

We’ve collected twelve of Logan’s best one-liners (or, more accurately, several-liners) and removed the names of the poets, poems, and volumes of poetry mentioned there-in. How many names of the poets Logan discusses can you guess? Email your answers to lf2413@columbia.edu by 1 PM, Tuesday, April 16. We’ll grade the responses, and the entry with the most correct answers will win a copy of William Logan’s Our Savage Art and The Undiscovered Country! The contest is now closed.

Update: Check here for the answers to the quiz!
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Colin Dayan, author of the forthcoming Like a Dog: Animal Law, Human Cruelty, and the Limits of Care, recently reviewed Marlene van Niekerk’s unjustly overlooked 2004 novel, Triomf for Public Books.

The novel explores the lives of a poor white South African family in the immediate months before South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994. The family is haunted by a legacy of sexual abuse and incest as well as the uncertainty of the nation’s future. Throughout the novel, van Niekerk, as Dayan shows, draws on the presence of dogs as reflective of both South Africa’s troubled history and as a way to explore moral questions. Dayan writes:

The dogs and the Benade clan who feed and love them force us to ask: what does conscience look like at the boundaries of humanity, at the edge of a cherished humanism? To read these pages is to experience a perspectival shift, a means of seeing otherwise or crosswise. “So, all in all,” as the narrator tells us, “the Benades haven’t got too much to complain about. That’s just the way things go in this world. In-out, on-off, here-there, dirty-clean, dog-dog.”

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“When we open a book and turn its pages, our paleopoetic past is never very long ago or far away.”—Christopher Collins

The following essay is by Christopher Collins, author of Paleopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination

In both biological and cultural evolution there is no turning back, no do-overs. As I began planning the project that would become the book, Paleopoetics, the principle of evolutionary biology that change is cumulative intrigued me the most. Steven Mithen had put it this way: “Evolution does not have the option of returning to the drawing board and beginning anew; it can only ever modify what has gone before. That is, of course, why we can only understand the modern mind by understanding the prehistory of the mind.” Culturally evolved skills, such as fire use, cooking, agriculture, writing, mathematics, and empirical science, like the genetically inherited traits upon which they are built, have been preserved and elaborated to generate further innovations, a progressive process that Michael Tomasello has called the “cultural ratchet.”

Then the idea struck me: there is no turning back because we carry within us our own biological past and nowhere is that past more systematically present than in our brain. It follows then that biological and cultural evolution form a continuum and, though the older functions of the brain are manifestly different from the newer functions, both sets are interdependent thanks to the plasticity of this organ. I subsequently became aware of “dual-systems theory,” a cognitive model that differentiates such opposites as impulse and planning, parallel and serial processing, nonverbal and verbal communication, and concrete and abstract thought. The primary goal of dual-systems theory is to explain illogical, maladaptive human behavior as the result of an unresolved conflict between the prehuman and the fully human brain.

While I find myself agreeing that conflict can arise when these opposite features compete for dominance, I can also see them as complementary functions. In Paleopoetics I explore the possibility that the arts, specifically the verbal arts, integrate these opposites, momentarily reconciling the old, long established modular centers with the more recently connected circuitry of the anatomically modern brain.

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The following post is by Saikat Majumdar, author of Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire. In the essay, Majumdar explains some of the central arguments and interventions of his book.

In praise of the book, Rebecca L. Walkowitz wrote, “Prose of the World is an enormously compelling and vivid study…. The result is an ambitious, timely, and eloquent account of the relationship between early-twentieth-century fiction and the contemporary global novel in English.”

World literature in English today makes up a field of comparative study of its own. It defies the usual equation of nation, language, and literature that has often formed the dominant model of studying comparative literature. To tell the story of this literature is also to tell the story of the British Empire. Prose of the World is an attempt to provide a cultural history of the global British Empire through a map of fiction produced at four representative points across it: Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and India.

However, the most distinctive aspect of Prose of the World is that it is an attempt to provide a cultural history of empire through structures of feeling and emotion. One necessary characteristic of any empire is that it is divided into a metropolis and its peripheries. The metropolis is where political and economic power is centered, usually the imperial capital, and its surrounding areas. Hard power naturally breeds soft power, so the metropolis also appears to be the cultural epicenter of the empire, its singular source of excellence in art, literature, fashion, in short, the center of all excitement, historical progress, and eventfulness. The great capitals of the global Anglophone and Francophone empires, London and Paris, were such metropolitan centers, especially in the heydays of imperialism in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Colonized nations were located along the political and cultural periphery of empire, far from its metropolitan center. Historical and anthropological research as well as literary narratives, reveal how the people in the colonies, often long after decolonization, experienced local and immediate life as lagging far behind in progress, devoid of eventfulness, and generally stifling, claustrophobic and dull. One of the greatest ideological consequences of empire is the feeling that history is concentrated in the metropolitan heart of empire, while the colonial periphery is a place where nothing happens, where life is banal, boring and devoid of historical meaning.

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This week our featured book is Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo by Mark C. Taylor. Remember to enter our Book Giveaway to win a FREE copy of Rewiring the Real. Today, the last day of our giveaway and blog promotion for Rewiring the Real, we have a special interview between Mark C. Taylor and one of the authors featured in Rewiring the Real, Mark Danielewski. In this interview, Professor Taylor and Danielewski discuss the influence of film and technology on House of Leaves. The entire interview can be found on the CUP website.

Mark Taylor: All right, let’s talk a little bit about various kinds of technologies and your work. Film obviously pervades your work in a variety of ways. Indeed, House of Leaves is modeled, among many other things, on a horror film, in certain ways. Only Revolutions is something like a road movie through American history. You grew up with a filmmaker as a father. You studied film at USC. Can you talk a little bit about the intersection of film in your writing and how film has shaped the way you think about writing?

M. Danielewski: I was raised by parents who made sure that we were watching movies in our basement. My father would bring home 16 mm prints of films by Kubrick, Welles, Ford and Sturges. I would have to change the reels.

Between reels, there was a discussion about what the movie was about. Some of my friends, who thought they were just there for movie night, would suddenly hear my father’s voice asking, “What is the political angle of this shot?”

My father would talk about choices – of color, costume, angles, camera movement, how a scene was constructed, the grammar of crossing the line or not crossing the line, the kind of equipment used. So, I was very fortunate to internalize that.

I’m always a little hesitant about terms like “experimental” and “avant-garde,” because I feel like so much of what I’m doing is built on what so many profound visualists were already doing. I mean, I’m not the first one to move text around.

But I think one little addition that I’ve been steadily working on is applying to text the grammatical laws of how we see things, in a very specific and limited way. So, there’s a way of leading the eye to a certain place, and then when you change the shot – or the page – if the eye is continuing to where it expects to continue, it’s actually kind of relaxing and pleasing.

But for action scenes, or scenes that have more intensity – you can think of A Touch of Evil at the very end where Heston is following Orson Welles – the camera angles are all over the place, but the eye is specifically being led to different corners of the frame, so that when the sequence is then cut, the eye has to travel from the right side – the upper right corner to the lower left corner.

So immediately, there’s that sense of searching for where the thread is continuing. By applying that to text and to the page, it could actually intensify the emotional experience of the reader.

A simple example is in the labyrinth chapter of House of Leaves. It intentionally slows you down. It confuses you. It disorients you. Then the following chapter has only a few sentences per page, and suddenly, you’re reading 100 pages. No matter who you are, there’s something very satisfying about reading 100 pages in a few minutes

With Only Revolutions, it very much uses light the way James Turrell uses light. It’s about seeing even if there are very few vocabulary words that are even part of the family of seeing. Colors, with the exception of two, are not present – the word “seeing” is not present. The way the world is perceived through the eye is not there . . . So that particular book floats somewhere between light and music.

Mark Taylor: I want to come back to this whole issue of design, which is crucial in this, but there’s another question on various technologies. Film’s not the only technology that’s important for you in many ways. I mean, House of Leaves began, and continues, online. It’s a text that involves not only a house that’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, but it isn’t contained between the covers, as it were. Your new work – we’ll talk about that more later – you’ve described as modeled as something like a TV series. One might say that part of what you’re exploring is what it means to write and read in an age of electronic reproduction, in certain ways. That you are really asking questions about the ways in which these visual technologies transform the ways in which we read and write. Is that something that’s self-consciously in your mind as you –

M. Danielewski: Well, everything transforms us, right? My father said something that was very important, and it was one of those early lessons I’ve held onto, and I see no reason to deviate from it, which is – imagine first, then find the technology that helps you embody that imaginative moment.

So I always start with wandering in my head. I start with a pencil and paper. I start scribbling. I start toying with different things, using my hands, whatever it is. And only then do I start to conceive of the software, the technology, that can be used to tell that story.

[…]

Mark Taylor: Can you talk a little bit about – because that’s an exceptional process, when you look at the complexity and the subtlety of a lot of this design work. So, you delivered to them, more or less, copy-ready text?

M. Danielewski: Yes. And it’s a cycle. While I’m conceiving something, I’m also educating myself on what, for example, CS6 or other various technologies can do. So, of course, that’s going to cycle back into my imagination and begin to influence me in certain ways.

This week our featured book is Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo by Mark C. Taylor. Remember to enter our Book Giveaway to win a FREE copy of Rewiring the Real. Today, we have a guest post from Professor Taylor, in which he discusses Rewiring the Real, Refiguring the Spiritual, and Recovering Place, and tells why Rewiring the Real might have begun, “Philosophy has lost its way.”

“Philosophy has lost its way”
Mark C. Taylor

Rewiring the Real is the second book in a trilogy that includes Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy (2012), and Recovering Place: Reflections on Stone Hill (2014). Refiguring the Spiritual begins, “Art has lost its way;” Rewiring the Real might have begun, “Philosophy has lost its way.” During the latter half of the twentieth-century, art and money entered into an unholy alliance in which artists eager to cash in on new money are selling works to financiers who resell them in hedge funds and private equity funds designed for ultra-rich investors looking for new ways to “diversify their portfolios with asset-backed securities.” While artists are trying to become Wall Street players, philosophers are trying to become scientists. As their work becomes more abstract and highly specialized, philosophers become less concerned about human problems and real world issues.

For art and philosophy to recover their missions, art must become more philosophical and philosophy must become more artistic in and through a rethinking of the interrelationship of art, philosophy and religion. This will require not only a change in substance but, more important, a change in style. This is not an original idea but can be traced to the publication of Kant’s pivotal Critique of Judgment (1790). It is no exaggeration to insist that this work has directly and indirectly shaped all philosophical, theological, artistic and, indeed, cultural discussions and production for more than two centuries. Kant provided the definition of art that became normative for Modernism. During the decade of the 1790s, discussions about Kant’s critical philosophy among a remarkable group of philosophers and writers, including, inter alia, Hegel, Schelling, Schiller, Schleiermacher, Hölderlin, Novalis, and the Schlegel brothers, led to a reconfiguration of the relationship among philosophy, art and religion. While leading thinkers in the eighteenth century had interpreted religion in either epistemological or ethical terms, writers, who gathered in Jena during the seminal decade of the 1790s, reconceived religion in terms of art and aesthetics. In their works, art displaced religion as the primary means for the exploration and expression of religious and spiritual concerns. Some of philosophers who have been most influential recently – Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida – are as much artists as philosophers. But they have all remained writers, whose works are literary or even poetic. Some of the leading twentieth-century visual artists – Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian, Malevich, Rothko, Reinhardt, Newman, Pollack – insist that art has a spiritual dimension.

Refiguring the Spiritual begins with a critique of what I describe as the “financialization of art.” What Andy Warhol is to consumer capitalism, Jeff Koons is to financial capitalism. But there is an importance difference between Andy and his epigone Jeff. While Warhol’s ironic detachment leaves the viewer uncertain whether he is criticizing or endorsing consumerism, there is no ambiguity about Koons. He eagerly endorses practices of the Wall Street wizards who pay excessive prices for eye candy intended to make them feel good. Beuys, Barney, Turrell and Goldsworthy reject this tendency in contemporary art. Each in his own way extends the preoccupations of the modern avant-garde art by drawing on different spiritual traditions (Beuys, Anthroposophy; Barney, Celtic and Masonic mythology; Turrell, Quakerism and Hopi myths and rituals; Goldsworthy, Celtic mythology). Their works are difficult and demanding – they cannot be consumed quickly but take time to appreciate. Though many of their works are expensive to create, they cannot be easily commodified. The primary purpose of their works is not to market them for a profit but to create the opportunity for the cultivation of personal and, by extension, social transformation.

Rewiring the Real extends my analysis from art to literature by analyzing one novel by four important writers: William Gaddis, The Recognitions; Richard Powers, Plowing the Dark; Mark Danielewski, House of Leaves; Don DeLillo, Underworld. Though these writers are very different, they share an appreciation for the ways in which recent technological innovations (Gaddis, electronic media and communications; Powers, virtual reality; Danielewski, Internet and World Wide Web; DeLillo, nuclear power and global financial networks) harbor a latent spirituality in an era that is too often labeled secular and posthuman. Rather than merely critically analyzing these novels, I attempt to engage the authors in a conversation that expands the inquiry beyond the boundaries each writer defines. As these writers begin to “talk” among themselves, we begin to see how their work can help readers understand the ways in which the very sense of reality is morphing in the global world of financial capitalism.

If style is substance and substance is style, then writing must change. In previous works (e.g., Imagologies: Media Philosophy, Grave Matters, Mystic Bones, Hiding, and Motel Réal: Las Vegas, Nevada), I have used different styles of writing and visual design to convey the ideas I am attempting to express. This ongoing experiment continues with this trilogy: Refiguring the Spiritual uses images and design to fashion arguments and Rewiring the Real includes accounts of some of my own artwork as well as my first attempt at writing fiction. Recovering Place will be my most ambitious experiment so far. In this multifaceted work, I take philosophy off the page by creating land art and sculpture (metal, rock, stone and bone) in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, where I live. In addition to a series of aphoristic reflections about the importance of recovering place in a world that is becoming ever more virtual, the book also includes original photographs I have taken of my art in its natural setting. As Kierkegaard, insisted long ago, many of the most important things in life can only be communicated indirectly. I would add to this that there are things that we can apprehend but not precisely comprehend. Through stylistic innovation and artistic design, I have attempted to create performative works that work at multiple levels to transform apprehension as well as introduce new ways of understanding the world in which we dwell.

Mark C. Taylor
Stone Hill

This week our featured book is Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo by Mark C. Taylor. Remember to enter our Book Giveaway to win a FREE copy of Rewiring the Real. Today, we have a fascinating Q&A with Professor Taylor, in which he delves into the relationships between art, technology, and religion he explores in greater detail in Rewiring the Real, and discusses the role of philosophy in a changing world.

Question: Rewiring the Real is part two of a trilogy, the first part of which is Refiguring the Spiritual. Both of these two works discuss important aspects of today’s society through analysis of a single work by important modern cultural figures (novelists and artists respectively). What led you to this conceit?

Mark C. Taylor: Let me begin by placing these two books within the larger trajectory of my work. For almost four decades, I have been developing an analysis of the interplay between religion and multiple aspects of culture. As I explain in After God, religion is not limited to what transpires in churches, synagogues, temples and mosques but pervades all aspects of society and culture. Unfortunately, the hyper-specialization and professionalization of the university discourage the multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural analyses that are, in my judgment, essential to effective critical inquiry.

In a series of books dating back to the late 1980s – Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion; Imagologies: Media Philosophy; About Religion: Economies of Faith in Virtual Culture; The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey and the Ends of Representation; Hiding; Grave Matters and Mystic Bones – I have explored the relationship of religion and philosophy to art. In some of these books, I use design to develop my argument. More recently, I have begun to expand philosophy beyond the printed page by creating artworks in different media – video games, photography. I am also engaged in creating art. In 2002, I had a major exhibition entitled Grave Matters as Mass MOCA and I am now engaged in a major land art and sculpture in the Berkshires.

There is also an historical context for this work. During the crucial decade of the 1790s, art and literature began to displace religion as the means for expressing religious and spiritual concerns. Though rarely acknowledged, it is not possible to understand many major twentieth-century artists and writers without an appreciation for their spiritual preoccupations. Refiguring the Spiritual and Rewiring the Real attempt to rectify this oversight.
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This week our featured book is Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo by Mark C. Taylor. Remember to enter our Book Giveaway to win a FREE copy of Rewiring the Real.

In Rewiring the Real, Professor Taylor examines four novels–William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, Richard Powers’s Plowing the Dark, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, and Don DeLillo’s Underworld–in order to reveal the similarities of the roles of religion and technology in modern culture. Check out our new Pinterest board focusing on Professor Taylor’s work, and on Rewiring the Real in particular, to learn more! Over the next few days, we’ll be adding more quotes from *Rewiring the Real*, so Like our board to keep up!

Here’s a couple of quick excerpts from *Rewiring the Real* on *House of Leaves* and *Underworld*:

“HOW Danielewski writes is as intriguing as WHAT he writes. Freely mixing high and low culture, he weaves together literary theory, architectural theory, film theory, philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis, modern and postmodern art and literature, detective fiction, and punk rock to create a book that baffles as much as it dazzles.” — Mark C. Taylor, Rewiring the Real

“What DeLillo understood before most others was that the Cold War–even the balance of terror–had been a stabilizing arrangement. The dissolution of the Soviet Union did not insure a secure world governed by one superpower but ushered in a radically unstable world in which power is decentralized, distributed, and dispersed in ways that make it much harder to identify, contain, and control individuals and states and nonstate agents.” — Mark C. Taylor, Rewiring the Real

This week our featured book is Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo by Mark C. Taylor.

Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of Rewiring the Real here on our blog, our Twitter feed, and Facebook page. We are also offering a FREE copy of the book to the winner of our Book Giveaway.

To enter our Book Giveaway, simply e-mail lf2413@columbia.edu with your name and preferred mailing address. We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

We conclude our week-long feature on How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces.

As a reminder for more on the book, you can also read Kate Briggs’s essay on translating Barthes and our visual tribute to the many faces of Roland Barthes.

Read an excerpt from How to Live Together. You will need to view in full screen, so click on icon in bottom right-hand corner:

With our recent publication of the first-ever English translation of How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces” by Roland Barthes, we thought a visual tribute was in order. Visit our board on Pinterest for more photos of Roland Barthes, frequently with cigarette in hand, looking like the quintessential French intellectual.

In the following post, Kate Briggs, the translator of How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces, discusses the challenges and joys of translating Roland Barthes.

“If I identify with Robinson Crusoe it’s not only because it took me far longer to write the lecture notes again in English than it did for Barthes to produce them in French (a matter of years versus a matter of months). It is also because translating Barthes has been an extended apprenticeship in writing.”—Kate Briggs

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is one of a handful of literary works that feature prominently in Barthes’s How to Live Together, and I re-read it for the purposes of the translation. This time around I was struck by one of the projects Robinson Crusoe sets himself quite early on in the novel: he decides to make a table.

The problem is Robinson Crusoe has never made a table before, just as he has never planted a crop before, glazed earthenware or cultivated goats. Of course, Robinson Crusoe is familiar with what it is he’s trying to make. He’s not about to make something wholly unprecedented—to invent the table, for example. His problem is how to make a table in these new, unlikely circumstances. He soon realizes that the methods used back in Hull, England will not work here: he doesn’t have the materials to hand, or the tools, plus there is the issue of personal aptitude (again, he’s never done this before). It is the unavailability of those original means of production that makes his problem interesting: as Robinson Crusoe is well aware, here on his deserted island there can be no question of making a table in the same way as the tables he’d written on prior to the shipwreck. This is the method he eventually comes up with:

If I wanted a board, I had no other way but to cut down a tree, set it on an edge before me, and hew it flat on either side with my axe, til I had brought it to be as thin as a plank, and then dub it smooth with my adze. It is true, by this method I could make but one board out of a whole tree, but this I had no remedy for but patience, any more than I had for the prodigious deal of time and labor which it took me up to make a plank or board. But my time or labor was little worth, and so it was as well employed one way as another…

So: one tree felled for every plank of wood. Some years later, Robinson Crusoe completes his task. The method is almost comical in its laboriousness (Wasn’t there a serviceable tree-trunk or rock ledge nearby?) and yet it is the closest analogy I have to the work of translation.

If I identify with Robinson Crusoe it’s not only because it took me far longer to write the lecture notes again in English than it did for Barthes to produce them in French (a matter of years versus a matter of months). It is also because translating Barthes has been an extended apprenticeship in writing – in writing an extant text again in entirely new circumstances, and with very different means at my disposal. What excites me most about translation – but also one of the things I find most difficult – is the way it forces you out of any acquired writing habits.

Translation is an exercise in uncovering new resources in the familiar language, expanding your vocabulary, giving a different cadence to your sentences. But actually allowing this to happen is not always so easy. I’d often read back over a passage I’d translated and realize that I’d been trying to make Barthes’s syntax fit some preconceived idea of what makes a good sentence. I had missed the point of the writing lesson. It was also important to remember that I was working with lecture notes, not books. The writing I was translating was originally intended to be read aloud in the amphitheatres of the Collège de France, a bit like a score for an oral performance. So the lesson in how to write was in fact a lesson in how to write a lecture course: how to make writing sound as if it had been written to be spoken, how to achieve Barthes’s unique combination of authority and humility– a quality he terms ‘non-arrogance’. Of the many revisions I made to the translation, it was the moments when he addresses his anticipated audience directly – wondering about their interest in his course, for example (Are they bored? Are they disappointed?) – that I found myself returning to over and again. I was working with a written trace of the lectures; nonetheless, those moments seemed especially ephemeral – it felt important to catch them in the right way.

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