Case of the Persevering Maltese: Collected Essays (American Literature) - Softcover

Mathews, Harry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1564782883 ISBN 13: 9781564782885

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 2003

Synopsis

A companion to The Human Country: New and collected Stories, this volume collects all of Harry Mathews's non-fiction, including an astonishing range of essays which discuss everything from complex literary and musical forms to the works of Lewis Carroll, Raymond Roussel, Italo Calvino, Joseph McElroy, George Perec and the OuLiPo. Throughout the collection, Mathews examines the relationship between form and literature in a lucid, intimate voice, arguing with erudition, grace and humour for the importance of artifice.

About this title

About the Author

Born in New York in 1930, Harry Mathews settled in Europe in 1952 and has since then lived in Spain, Germany, Italy, and (chiefly) France. When Mathews published his first poems in 1956, he was associated with the so-called New York School of poets, with three of whom (John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler) he founded the review Locus Solus in 1961. Through his friendship with Georges Perec, he became a member of the Oulipo in 1972. The author of six novels and several collections of poetry, recent publications are THE NEW TOURISM (Sand Paper Press, 2010), Sainte Catherine, a novella written in French (Editions P.O.L, 2000), The Human Country: the Collected Short Stories (Dalkey Archive Press, 2002), The Case of the Persevering Maltese: Collected Essays (Dalkey Archive Press, 2003), OULIPO COMPENDIUM (co-edited with Alastair Brotchie; Atlas Press and Make Now Press, 2005), and My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005).

Reviews

Mathews is an American writer and literary critic whose creative and interpretive philosophies were shaped profoundly by his expatriate years in France, where he fell in with the Oulipo (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature; famous names include Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, and Italo Calvino). A group of mathematically inclined writers with a penchant for the complex, the obscure, and the musical, the Oulipo fiction-writing strategy involves placing formulaic and often arbitrary constraints on the writing process (no using the letter e, for example) to make it appear strange and thus elicit hidden representations and accidental truths. Mathews' reverence for his fellow Oulipians is clear, and as a non-native French speaker, his fascination with the "hiddenness of language" is multiplied by the challenge of linguistic and cultural translation. Covering a wide range of topics--Wagner to Lewis Carroll to magical Venice to Andre Breton's sex life, plus extensive coverage of his Oulipian compatriots--Mathew's essays are full of intelligence and challenge, to be enjoyed by lit-crit fans and readers of Mathews' own fiction. Brendan Driscoll
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Edition details

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1564782883
• ISBN 13: 9781564782885
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 332