by hilzoy
He asks:
"What is the best-known literary work in English not currently in print?I have a nominee: Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World. Temple University Press seems to have put out a one-volume addition (doubtless abridged) in 1972, but that seems to be it. Five-volume sets sell for between $1500 and $2000 at the antiquarian booksellers."
This is the sort of puzzle that makes it clear why comments are such a great idea. Since Mark doesn't have them, and since it's such a good question, I'm posing the same question here. Offhand, Hakluyt's Voyages leaps to mind; and Sir Edward Coke's writings on law are available only in a 'selected writings' edition.
I want to add another question: what's the work that is most inexplicably not in print in an English translation? I propose to limit this to European works on the grounds that the situation with regard to translations of works from non-European intellectual traditions is too appalling to make this sort of game any fun. On the one hand, it's much too easy to come up with works that absolutely should exist in translation, but don't; on the other, it's impossible to decide which unbelievable and horrifying lacuna is worst. Thus, the limitation.
My nominee for most inexplicably out of print work in a European language other than English: any of the writings of Condorcet.
Churchill's The World Crisis, unabridged version.
Posted by: Anderson | December 09, 2005 at 11:24 AM
And if Amazon may be credited, there's no unabridged version of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary.
Posted by: Anderson | December 09, 2005 at 11:30 AM
If you hadn't said "literary work", I'd have popped right out with Inertial Navigation Systems Analysis by Kenneth Britting (1971). It's since been replaced by other texts, but it's still frequently used as a reference for notation. I use mine fairly often, just to see if they'd thought of, say, gravity anomaly maps back then. I also used to have a copy (a set, actually) of MacAulay's History of England that was quite old and quite probably out of print, but the writing was arid enough that the loss might not be widely regretted.
Dregs of the Earth, sadly, seems to be still out of reach for the casual buyer. Not literary, but music that should never have been allowed to fall out of print.
Sometimes things come back, though. Nathaniel Bowditch's American Practical Navigator (1802) was, apparently, so damned useful to marine navigators (as well as a source of coolness for the geeky) that NIMA now publishes it. Cheap cover and binding, sure, but at least you can buy a copy, and NIMA's updated it so that it's fairly current.
Posted by: Slartibartfast | December 09, 2005 at 12:01 PM
As for the European work question, I can't understand why we still have only half of Jacques Lacan's Ecrits translated. Okay, so Lacan is generally dismissed nowadays, but since when did that become an obstacle.
Posted by: Anderson | December 09, 2005 at 12:37 PM
Note to all lit grad students: this topic contains possible dissertation projects, if you get to do translations.
Condorcet's Vie de M. Turgot, for instance: Mill said of it:
And yet it was only translated once, in (iirc) 1776. I have been puttering about with it off and on (recently, off) for ages, just for fun, but I'm really not good enough. Someone should translate it.
Posted by: hilzoy | December 09, 2005 at 01:51 PM
While you're at it, Condillac - his "Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge" is available but not his political economy, "Le commerce et le gouvernement considérés relativement l'un à l'autre." I'm not sure it's ever been translated into English at all, despite the fact that it may have precedence as the first serious theory of value grounded in utility - from a priest no less. He even understood present valuation of future utility. I believe he influenced Say, Turgot, and Mill, among others. But no English translation. Go figure.
More recently, the two-volume set of A.J. Liebling's works ("Liebling at Home" and "Liebling Abroad") have been out of print for nearly 20 years. Somebody ought to be headed for the pokey for that oversight.
Posted by: dcbob | December 09, 2005 at 03:12 PM
And since this thread isn't taking fire, I'll clog it some more with a related question: When do we get a respectable translation of Being & Time? (As opposed to the Stambaugh version. Took a class on Nietzsche with her at CUNY. Hugely unimpressive. No surprise that the same is true of her translation.)
Posted by: Anderson | December 09, 2005 at 03:29 PM
Anderson, I deleted an earlier snide comment about translating Lacan. Since it wasn't very clever, perhaps you can imagine a better version.
William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice is OUP, but there seem to be a number of copies from the 1970s abridged paperback edition still floating around. My local bookstore once located an unabridged copy, but it was way expensive.
Posted by: Jackmormon | December 09, 2005 at 04:02 PM
Darn. That should be OOP (out of print), not OUP (Oxford University Press).
Posted by: Jackmormon | December 09, 2005 at 04:17 PM
I am but an egg.
Posted by: Gary Farber | December 09, 2005 at 04:19 PM
My own perspective is that stuff falls out of print all the time, and that's too bad, and should be cured by online versions, of course, but my query is as to what is the most interesting text not easily available. There have been interesting suggestions so far, but the overall texture doesn't seem to be terribly negative.
Posted by: Gary Farber | December 09, 2005 at 04:29 PM
Anderson, I deleted an earlier snide comment about translating Lacan. Since it wasn't very clever, perhaps you can imagine a better version.
Something along the lines of Dorothy Parker's reaction to Coolidge's death, "How can they tell?" ...
Student paging through Lacan translation: "Oops, I think I got an untranslated copy."
Posted by: Anderson | December 09, 2005 at 04:32 PM
Doesn't count, but plenty of music is hard as heck to find in print.
Posted by: rilkefan | December 09, 2005 at 04:32 PM
This rhetorical question from "The Freudian Thing" (Ecrits, tran. Sheridan) goes out to the lawyers in da house:
I can but wish I knew the keyboard shortcuts to represent graphically Lacan's marvellous equation of the ratio of the signifier over the signified to the square root of the negative self, from "Subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire."Posted by: Jackmormon | December 09, 2005 at 05:01 PM
Lacan blows. A lot. Maybe more than Bush.
Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | December 09, 2005 at 05:13 PM
Heck, there's a lot used in legal history that as far as I know, we don't even have in any editions at all, let alone translated. I was rather taken about how much of Hostiensis is still only in manuscript form. Ditto for the non-existent complilations of Italian statute law.
And by the way, MS Word really really doesn't like having lots of Latin typed into it.
Posted by: tzs | December 09, 2005 at 05:17 PM
Jackmormon: you have no idea how heartening it is to hear scorn for Lacan coming from the ranks of rising humanities Ph.D.s. Hopefully, jettisoning the rest of what they call "theory" will follow...
Posted by: hilzoy | December 09, 2005 at 05:27 PM
I just remembered another amazingly untranslated work -- Grotius on the Law of the Sea, which is one of the founding works of international law, and guess what? It has been translated!
Obviously, I have to get it right now, in the nanosecond before it goes out of print again.
Posted by: hilzoy | December 09, 2005 at 05:46 PM
Hopefully, jettisoning the rest of what they call "theory" will follow...
Oooh, fighting words ...
But instead of fighting, I will fall back on Paul de Man's definition of English departments as being devoted to the study of everything except their own subject.
(De Man's alternative was an English department devoted to his negative theology of literary meaning, which I found attractive, though not enough to actually write a dissertation on it or anything like that.)
Posted by: Anderson | December 09, 2005 at 05:56 PM
Jackmormon presents an opportunity to compare the new Fink translation:
Works better for me. I'm pretty sure he's not talking about the law I'm looking up on Westlaw, though.(Isn't "The Freudian Thing" his big polemic against ego psychology? I think I hazily recall that Anna Freud was actually in the audience.)
Posted by: Anderson | December 09, 2005 at 06:08 PM
"that is to say" or "In other words" above is just hilarious, esp. the latter. "Gobbledy gookledy; in other words, gokledy goobledy."
Posted by: rilkefan | December 09, 2005 at 06:27 PM
"Gobbledy gookledy; in other words, gokledy goobledy."
Amazing! Here rilkefan succinctly restates in just 7 words what it took Lacan more than 100 to say! This clearly demonstrates why one must never underestimate the value of having a poet as a constant poster on ones blog.
Posted by: xanax | December 09, 2005 at 06:42 PM
English Departments can't jettison theory because it is now too important to historicism and to understanding critical heritage. Not that this makes Lacan any more palatable, but...there are some babies in that bathwater.
And either way (says the grad student at Critical Theory U.) a theory is only as useful as its ability to reveal something new about the work under analysis. Theory should never obscure or distort the work in question.
Third opinion...never mistake theory's overenthusiastic reception with what various theorists were trying to do. Every kid thinks he's Bruce Lee after seeing a kung fu movie. The first bloody nose convinces him differently.
And sometimes Bruce Lee isn't Bruce Lee either.
Posted by: nous_athanatos | December 09, 2005 at 06:49 PM
The Internal Revenue Code of 1954.
Posted by: Ugh | December 09, 2005 at 06:55 PM
As for books out of print, I'm stretching the definition quite a bit here, but I think someone needs to collect the copyright on the text adventure games that were all over computers during the 70s and 80s and keep them available on modern platforms. I think the same can be said for early role-playing games both in print and on computer.
Posted by: nous_athanatos | December 09, 2005 at 07:18 PM
Nous is absolutely right, says the grad student at New Historicism U who did some time at Semiotics U. Even Lacan's theories have some important kernels. In there. Somewhere.
To our resident poetry/physics guy: one of the saddest moments in my life was when, in a Lacan seminar, a mathematics dept grad student finished his forty-minute presentation on Lacan's knot diagrams of the psyche. The mathematician had applied knot-theory to the diagrams in order to puzzle out which knots held, which didn't, all charming presuming that Lacan had drawn those illustrations in good faith. After the earnest young mathematician concluded his (baffling and thwarted) presentation, the professor murmured something like: "It is possible that these diagrams were intended more as symbols than as exact models."
Posted by: Jackmormon | December 09, 2005 at 07:38 PM
"baffling and thwarted"
Baffling and baffled?
Posted by: rilkefan | December 09, 2005 at 08:29 PM
Yeah, when baffled can be glossed as stymied into absurdity.
Posted by: Jackmormon | December 09, 2005 at 08:49 PM
I hadn't really known "baffling" originally meant "thwarting" before "puzzling" until just now.
Posted by: rilkefan | December 09, 2005 at 09:02 PM
OK, so here's the thing about -- well, I won't say 'theory', since that's not really a term I can use exactly, but 'all that incomprehensible stuff people were reading:
(a) It is an insult to the language it was written in. I love, LOVE, language, and for that reason I HATE things that seem to me to gratuitously insult it.
(b) I feel, when confronted with it, as though the author had come up to me and said: hi. If you spend several years of your life figuring out what I meant, I assure you that it will be worth it. And then I say: the number of people I am prepared to do that for is very small. Kant leaps to mind. But not for people I secretly suspect could have written a lot more clearly, but were too infatuated with themselves to bother.
(c) When I have slogged through some such work (and, for my sins, I have), I have generally felt that someone in philosophy of language has made the same point, only much more clearly and without the grandiose claims about its significance.
(d) (Only applies to some bits of literary theory of the past few decades): Some works seem to me to suffer from, and also to encourage, what I think of as the soup theory of arguments. -- I tend to think of arguments as being sort of like motors: you need not just to have the right parts, but to have them hooked up to one another in the right ways, in order to make your point. So lots of interesting and worthwhile claims are not one of the right parts for your particular purpose, and merely having the right parts isn't enough.
I was in a faculty seminar involving, well, reading a bunch of stuff picked by people who liked theory, and they (people and authors) seemed to have a different view. First, it seemed to be an accepted form of criticism to say, to someone who had written a book on (e.g.) accounts of women in X that that person should have also talked about (e.g.) accounts of gays in X, not on the grounds that the author had omitted all accounts of lesbians, who are women too, but on the grounds that the treatment of gays is important too, so how can one write a book that doesn't talk about it?
Thus, one aspect of the soup theory: it's important to have all, and I mean all, the right ingredients. You cannot leave something out on the grounds that you are talking about a different topic. It must go into the pot.
Then, there seemed to be no concern for argumentative structure. Thus, the second aspect of the soup theory: you don't need to do anything with these themes besides: leave them simmering in your book for hours, until they infuse one another.
(This always seemed to me to lead to the bizarre view that there was one perfect book, containing all the right ingredients in the right proportions. Or at least, one perfect non-fiction book. Which is madness.)
(e) I think intellectuals should at least try for accessibility. (Thus, in part, my blogging.) Need I say more?
(f) For people who purport to be concerned with political activism, they have chosen a pretty odd venue to act in.
(g) They are talking about some of my favorite books, and often they say such inane things about them. -- I secretly suspect, about some of the people I have read, that they wish they were not English professors, and are taking revenge on the books love of which got them into it.
I should say that there are exceptions to this. I tend to think, for instance, that Gayatri Spivak's work is a brilliant piece of performance art, the aim of which is to induce, in privileged people in the first world, the same feeling of complete dislocation experienced by a lot of people in the third world in the face of European/American culture; and that it is quite deliberately literally incomprehensible. (I came up with this view during the same faculty seminar, watching the other people in it, thinking: I have seen this split between a facile acceptance and an equally facile rejection, with no apparent middle ground, before, and realizing that it was in talking to people in very dislocated third-world cultures, some of whom condemned the west and all its works, and some of whom became shallowly westernized, but almost none of whom felt that they were in a position to assess the West, with confidence, on their own terms, and take what they needed and leave the rest. The reactions of the people in this seminar were eerily similar.)
So, there are my fighting words. I should also say that I am eminently willing to be talked out of them.
Posted by: hilzoy | December 09, 2005 at 09:26 PM
Oh my. I've got to run out, but about the gentle lady, your interpretation may be accurate. It is certainly charitable.
And--wow, since when does ObWi have a Turing Test?
Posted by: Jackmormon | December 09, 2005 at 09:54 PM
It is utterly astonishing to me that there are people in the world who claim that passages like the one quoted by Jackmormon make sense, and are even worthy of discussion. It is even more astonishing that these people are regarded by some as "intellectuals."
And what in the world can "the square root of the negative self" mean, other than that the person using the phrase is a babbling fool?
Perhaps I'm a hopeless Philistine, but it does seem to me that this particular emperor is as naked as he was at the moment of his birth.
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov | December 09, 2005 at 10:08 PM
I tried reading Lacan at some point in French, thinking it might make more sense. Nope. Unfortunately there's a bloody load of modern French "philosophers" who think his style is to be imitated. And this is the same country that has provided us with Montesquieu and Descartes.
I didn't know Grotius hadn't yet been translated! (Have read chunks of the original.) A lot of the early legal stuff I would argue is better in the original since otherwise it's really hard to corkscrew your mind around all the dependent clauses--you have to do a really loose translation. I think it was Toynbee who complained about the difficulty of translating Greek, especially Greek philosophy. One can construct these wonderful parentheses within parentheses --really difficult to write down intelligently but trivial to understand in Greek. They really need to be translated into sentences and a load of footnotes.
Posted by: tzs | December 09, 2005 at 10:22 PM
Lacan is an arrogant, pretentious s.o.b., but this is not inconsistent with actual, or even worthwhile, thought. He could certainly have expressed himself more clearly, but he enjoyed his style, a kind of performance art. I am told the Seminars are positively Humean by comparison.
At any rate, Hegel is about as miserable to read. ("But Hegel's nonsense, too!" Okay, late James?)
Having skimmed back over "The Freudian Thing," he's attacking "Freudians" who have identified the self with the ego, thus making the unconscious something "out there" which the ego defends itself against. This is heresy to Lacan, who sees Freud's accomplishment as destabilizing the self by arguing that the ucs. is part of the ego, or possibly vice-versa (I forgets).
Offhand I cannot do much to explicate the Lacan passage, which appears near the end of the lecture. (Yes, boys and girls, originally people had to LISTEN to that. You see how much he enjoyed befuddling them. Tho Lacan's was the generation that hung out listening to Kojeve on Hegel.) I *think* his general point is that ego psychology grossly underestimates how much our psyche is bound up with the superego, and that its practitioners are kidding themselves about the prospects for therapy under such a misapprehension.
Hilzoy's points are all well-taken, and if you're not curious enough about literature to be willing to slog through some slop, that is perfectly understandable. I would only add that many non-philosophers would find many of her points equally applicable to Kant. Thank god he didn't blog.
Anyway, if I were going to defend theory, I wouldn't start with Lacan. He's not even doing literary theory. (I will suggest that psychoanalysis may have more to tell us about reading than about the soul. Emphasis on "intepretation" in Interpretation of Dreams
Posted by: Anderson | December 09, 2005 at 10:25 PM
And this is the same country that has provided us with Montesquieu and Descartes.
Ah, Descartes, the dangers of clarity. Had he written more obscurely, there might be Cartesians today .... ;)
(Fell in love with Hobbes, not from Leviathan, but from his comments on the Meditations.)
Posted by: Anderson | December 09, 2005 at 10:27 PM
Anderson: the thing is, I am curious about literature. Very curious. I just don't find that any of the theory I have encountered actually satisfies that curiosity.
As I said last time, I am completely open to the idea that I have just encountered the wrong theorists, or something.
Posted by: hilzoy | December 09, 2005 at 10:30 PM
And yes, Hobbes' comments on the Meditations are wonderful, as are Gassendi's.
Posted by: hilzoy | December 09, 2005 at 10:31 PM
Anderson: the thing is, I am curious about literature. Very curious. I just don't find that any of the theory I have encountered actually satisfies that curiosity.
That was what attracted me to de Man--I was in a grad program in English, and everyone took a given text as an occasion for a departure into sociology, politics, history, whatever ....
De Man argued that this was because of literature's nature as signifiers w/out signification (doubtless I am disremembering the terminology). Madame Bovary wasn't "about" anything, but we inevitably treat language as being "about" something. Of course, it gets a little bleak demonstrating that any reading is a misreading, etc.
Posted by: Anderson | December 09, 2005 at 11:01 PM
Hmm. I'm not going out after all.
Okay, here's a couple of very general things about literary theory. 1) One very influential school of literary theory is in fact more about language than literature. 2) Another very influential school is more about narrative than about literature. 3) I'd say that around 1970, the two schools intersect in France and start making some very big claims. 4) Some of these claims are simply unfalsifiable, some are falsified, some are rather useful at uncovering new ways at looking at old materials, some convince people to root around in archives and find new material. 5) Much of literary theory, so called, was/is more interested in using literature for other ends (often nebulously defined).
A lot of "soup" theory, but also a lot of books that needed to be written for tenure...
Academics have been aware that literary theory is in trouble for many years now. A couple of recent and not-so recent titles: Consequences of Theory (ed. Arac and Johnson, 1988) and After Theory (Eagleton, 2004)... Just google "post theory," and you come up with 19,000 results: the front page is almost all academic book hits.
I really do think that people are right now engaging in a very useful long second look at what happened in the 1970s and 80s. What ideas can be retrieved? What were the justifications for certain lines of thought? The cult of personality surrounding many major theorists is beginning to evaporate, and people are freeing up the insights from the baggage.
On that last. Anderson, if you've read Lacan's seminars, you've seen those terrifyingly obsequious q-and-a sessions at the end of each lecture. More than anything else, those moments warned me off taking Lacan too seriously. But then, Semiotics U. was actually U. Semiotique, and I learned the hard way how to be really suspicious of stylish French professors.
Hilzoy, here are some lit crit books you might enjoy. Erich Auerbach's Mimesis (skip around!). Anything by Jonathan Arac, Tzvetan Todorov, William Empson, or Rene Wellek. I'm recommending a lot of people who are considered "old crusties," but they are still read, referenced, and taken seriously. Many in the "post theory" crowd are indeed writing more field-focused stuff; my list is already tilted towards my interests.
***
Since I keep failing the Turing Test, I see that Anderson has written about De Man, a theorist who (with the help of a hardcore Demaniac professor) pulled my head apart and yet to whom I keep returning for insight. There's one who cared deeply about literature--but his central lesson was that carely deeply about literature was a sure route into self-betrayal into totalitarianism. A brilliant, bleak, obsessional reader--and a mordant, oblique, seven-degrees-of-irony writer.
Posted by: Jackmormon | December 09, 2005 at 11:31 PM
Jackmormon, I'm innocent of the Seminars, & likely to remain so now that my polemical inclinations have been redirected to lawyering.
Agree w/ everything you've said, except I think one can read too much into PdM's youthful flirtation w/ Nazism. Auerbach & Empson especially good.
I tend to think theory died of becoming politicized as much as anything else, but that is probably bias on my part. As Hilzoy noted, there are more effective ways to be political, but if you want to just feel self-important, an English dep't is a good place to wax political.
Some of the pros & cons of theory admittedly were due to being in English dep'ts. Pro: openness to stuff like continental philosophy, not popular in America. Con: lack of rigor & professional discipline in pursuit of same. Examples could be multiplied.
Hilzoy: thanx for the Gassendi pointer; I now want to pick up the Meds. w/ comments. Haven't touched 'em since undergrad.
Posted by: Anderson | December 09, 2005 at 11:44 PM
I'm grateful that when I analyze literature it's without any sophisticated or sophistical theory. I get to ask myself "how does this strike me?" and not worry about anything else.
Posted by: rilkefan | December 10, 2005 at 12:26 AM
I have generally felt that someone in philosophy of language has made the same point, only much more clearly and without the grandiose claims about its significance
Why are you so awesome, Hilzoy? We should dig up Lacan and purge his bones from the earth for his sins.
Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | December 10, 2005 at 12:50 AM
???
Posted by: hilzoy | December 10, 2005 at 12:56 AM
one can read too much into PdM's youthful flirtation w/ Nazism.
Probably. Still, cautions and expiations are the main themes of his work. And it's hard not to take seriously the ruminations of genuinely self-critical people who once fell sway to repellent doctrines.
My European history teacher in high school outed himself, every year, to every class, as having been in the Hitler Youth. Every year, he recalled how fun it had been, how simply wearing the brown uniform earned one hospitality all over the countryside. He then went on to teach about Hitler's atrocities, of course, but his willingness to put his personal memories of having been seduced on the table (and in a school where almost 40% of the students were Jewish) represents true pedegogical courage to me. It took me years to understand exactly what kind of ritual that teacher was involved in; reading De Man made my HS teacher clearer to me, although, perhaps, at the risk of clouding De Man.
**
&#%^&, I keep failing these Turing Tests!
Posted by: Jackmormon | December 10, 2005 at 12:57 AM
Anderson: the Gassendi/Descartes objections and replies are, I think, the ones in which Gassendi takes to addressing Descartes as 'O Mind', and Descartes returns the favor by responding: 'O Flesh...' It's quite funny.
rilkefan: I like your post on the poem.
Posted by: hilzoy | December 10, 2005 at 01:15 AM
Hilzoy:
I had to read some Lacan, along with some other Lit Crit types, in college. I found it incomprehensible garbage, and, later, came to believe (with very little basis) roughly what you said in the quoted part. It's nice to read that said by someone with an academic background for that opinion.
I loathe Lacan. Deeply. Personally.
Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | December 10, 2005 at 01:22 AM
I forgot to mention in my post that the New Yorker sucks for just dropping the poem into the magazine like that.
That poems of Elizabeth Bishop, one of the greatest poets of the last century, are not in print is both on topic and a source of continuting annoyance to me.
Posted by: rilkefan | December 10, 2005 at 01:29 AM
SCMT, it could be worse - Lacan could be in the Bush admin.
Posted by: rilkefan | December 10, 2005 at 01:33 AM
rilkefan: now I'll have nightmares.
Posted by: hilzoy | December 10, 2005 at 01:49 AM
Lacan is easy to hate and some European psychoanalytic types still shake their heads and wonder why he hit it big in the states. I would avoid him entirely if I could, but Derrida and Kittler have made that impossible.
Some critical theory is indeed quite opaque. Some needlessly so, and others needfully. Derrida could not have changed his style and still made the same point because his language was his point a lot of the time. His later works where he is not dealing as directly with issues of language are much more readable, though he still can't resist making puns all the time. He was an imp. Besides, I have a hard time not liking someone who told an interviewer he would rather have been a soccer player but just wasn't any good at it.
I will also confess a deep fondness for Wolfgang Iser. He is still incredibly sharp, even in his 80s.
Gayatri Spivak...no comment.
Posted by: nous_athanatos | December 10, 2005 at 02:02 AM
Iser rocks. She whom I fear to name even pseudonymously for fear of what she's done to lovely people whom I know: what you said.
Posted by: Jackmormon | December 10, 2005 at 02:16 AM
On The Marble Cliffs, by the German writer Ernst Junger, is a book that should be in print. It was published in 1939, and subsequently banned by the Nazis when it grew to be too popular(not all Germans were supporters of the Nazis, just as all Americans, thank God or whoever, are not Bush-ite Republicans - I by the way am not American).The novel gives a brilliant account of the seizure of political power by an 'old connoisseur' of power who in addition to having a resemblance to politicians like Hitler and Stalin bears a quite astonishing resemblance, in his cynicism, arrogance, dishonesty and ruthlessness, to many of the people at the top of the present American administration, people who have the effrontery to call themselves Republicans when clearly they have no respect or care for the Republic. I do hope that rather more American people will awake to what is being done in their name and in the name of the Republic.
Posted by: Tim Harris | December 10, 2005 at 07:43 AM
I will also confess a deep fondness for Wolfgang Iser.
I got a great kick from The Act of Reading, which was the 1st book I read that seemed to address what we do when we read. Michael Bérubé has an essay online about "Why No One's Heard of Wolfgang Iser" that is worth a look.
Posted by: Anderson | December 10, 2005 at 11:14 AM
Anderson-
I think this thread is mostly dead, but...
I saw the Bérubé essay a while back, but never read it all the way through. Now that I have, I think his analysis is spot on and it fits with what I know of Iser's and Fish's personalities(though Fish's only by reputation). Iser's "loss" in the exchange came primarily because he was not listening to what Fish was saying, but rather to what he thought Fish was saying. Iser is not easily moved from any point once he has it in his mind -- not so much from stubbornness as from habit and the need to think something through to the end before he is ready to shift position.
Bérubé is a sharp one.
Posted by: nous_athanatos | December 11, 2005 at 04:36 PM
I used to have a long list of sadly-out-of-print 20th century science fiction classics that I knew of through used book stores, but most of them are actually back in print today, to everyone's benefit.
Posted by: Matt McIrvin | December 11, 2005 at 10:35 PM
"&#%^&, I keep failing these Turing Tests!"
You keep being revealed to not be human, but a bot? (Puzzled.)
Posted by: Gary Farber | December 12, 2005 at 04:29 AM
I think this thread is mostly dead, but...
Yeah, nothing like Lacan to kill a thread!
Glad you liked the MB essay. He's that wonderful thing, a theory-oriented English prof with a working b.s. detector.
Posted by: Anderson | December 12, 2005 at 12:25 PM
Yo can get some out of print works from project gutenberg of course.
We have something similar in Dutch, with a list of projects in other languages at the bottem of the frame.
Posted by: dutchmarbel | December 12, 2005 at 04:35 PM