The Wretched of the Earth

It comes as something ofa surprise to reflect that the New York Review ofBooks is now over twenty years old. Even people of my generation (that is, old enough to remember the revolutionary 196os but not young enough to have taken a very exciting part in them) think of the paper as eternally youthful. In fact, it has gone through years of relatively quiet life, yet, as always in a competitive journalistic market, it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history (especially an admittedly impressionistic survey that tries to include something of the intellectual context in which a journal has operated) must give some attention. Not all the attacks which the New York Review has attracted, both early in its career and more recently, are worth more than a brief summary. What do we now make, for example, of Richard Kostelanetz's forthright accusation that 'The New York Review was from its origins destined to publicize Random House's (and especially [Jason] Epstein's) books and writers'?1 Well, simply that, even if the statistics bear out the charge (and Kostelanetz provides some suggestive evidence to support it, at least with respect to some early issues), there is nothing surprising in a market economy about a publisher trying to push his books through the pages of a journal edited by his friends. True, the New York Review has not had room to review more than around fifteen books in each issue and there could be a bias in the selection of

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3507774.pdf

The New York Review of Books

Culture and Imperialism

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Briggs, Asa and Peter Burke. 2005. A Social History of the Media from Gutenberg to the Internet. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2006. \"Introduction: Did Somebody Say New Media?\" In Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Kennan eds., New Media/Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 1-11. Deibert, Ronald. 1997. Parchment, Printing and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation. New York: Columbia University Press. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2006. \"Early Film History and Multi-Media: An Archaeology of Possible Futures?\" In Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Kennan eds., New Media/Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 13-26. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Luhman, Niklas. 2000. The Reality of the Mass Media. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2006. \"Network Subjects or, The Ghost is the Message.\" In Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan eds., New Media/Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 335-345. Saenger, Paul. 1997. \"Introduction\" to Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 1-17. Thorburn, David and Henry Jenkins eds. 2003. Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. Boston: MIT Press.

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (review)

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website andthrough Knowledge Unlatched.Situated at the intersection of postcolonial studies, affect studies, and narratology, Affective Disorders explores the significance of emotion in a range of colonial and postcolonial narratives. Through close readings of Naguib Mahfouz, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, and Upamanyu Chatterjee, among others, Bede Scott argues that literary representations of emotion need not be interpreted solely at the level of character, individual psychology, or the contingencies of plotting, but could also be related to broader sociopolitical forces. We thus find episodes of anger that serve as a collective response to the 'modernity' of wartime Cairo, feelings of jealousy that are inspired by the slave economy of imperial Brazil, and an overwhelming sense of boredom that emerges, in the late eighties, out of the bureaucratic procedures of the Indian Administrative Service. Affective Disorders also explores in some detail the formal consequences of these feelings – the way in which affective states such as anger or jealousy can often destabilize narratives, provoking crises of representation, generic ambivalence, and discursive rupture. By emphasizing the social origin of these emotions, and by analysing their influence on literary discourse, this study provides a deeper understanding of the relationship between various sociopolitical forces and the affective and aesthetic 'disorders' to which they give rise.

Affective Disorders: Emotion in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature

This article explores the quality of lightness in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s . Precisely what kind of lightness do we find in the novel, what are some of its defining characteristics and what are the key strategies by which this effect is achieved? I begin by discussing the narrative’s readability, its linguistic transparency and its deliberate attenuation of supplementary meaning. This transparency, I would like to suggest, ultimately impedes our standard interpretative procedures, frustrating any attempt to reinstate (plausible) symbolic meaning. I then address in greater detail the “depthlessness” of the novel, its emphasis on surfaces and immediate legibility. Finally, I offer an analysis of Holly Golightly herself, making the argument that as a character she shares (and indeed determines) many of the novel’s lighter qualities — attaching supreme value to “the surface of things,” privileging the signifier over the signified and actively pursuing the freedom and mobility of non-meaning.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.34.3.128

On Superficiality: Truman Capote and the Ceremony of Style

This article explores the representation of serial murder in Roberto Bolano’s 2666, focusing in particular on Part Four, “The Part About the Crimes,” which provides a thinly fictionalized account o...

Roberto Bolaño’s 2666: Serial Murder and Narrative Necrosis

This article explores the triviality that so emphatically distinguishes Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book from other masterpieces of the Heian age (794–1186). Although the circumstances surrounding its co...

“EVERY TRIVIAL LITTLE THING”: Sei Shonagon and the Poetics of Insignificance

Reading the Uninteresting: Upamanyu Chatterjee's English, August: An Indian Story

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