There’s a good deal of nostalgia in your new book, The Task of the Critic, for the “socialist culture” of the Seventies.
What’s wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press. One of Walter Benjamin’s extraordinary achievements, for example, was to make a kind of revolutionary virtue out of a certain concept of looking back, or nostalgia. As a tutor at Oxford during that period, I could see all kinds of energies that simply had no outlet - all kinds of radical impulses that were rather inchoate, but certainly present. So I think nostalgia is justified to some extent.

There was at least one outlet for those energies, though: the Marxism seminar you ran at Wadham College, which you describe as a “hostel for battered leftists”. The left took even more of a battering in the intervening 30-odd years, didn’t it?
I think the Gramsci formula about pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will gets at something. But I was struck, when I spoke recently at King’s College London, by the extraordinarily diverse number of militant projects and campaigns that were being either conducted or planned. It was like being back in the Seventies, or the late Sixties. For the full interview…

From the Poetry Foundation: Ilya Kaminsky and Adam Kirsch…

ADAM KIRSCH: First of all, let me say congratulations on The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. It’s a moving and impressive book, and I hope you’ll be able to talk a bit about how you edited it—there are so many poets from so many parts of the world, I wondered how you found them all. There are famous poems here—one of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Akhmatova’s “Requiem,” Celan’s “Deathfugue”—but I think every reader will make a lot of discoveries, too. I particularly liked W.S. Merwin’s translations of the Argentine poet Roberto Juarroz, whose “Life Draws a Tree” is a wonderfully spare defense of art as the third force that balances life and death.

But let me start by asking you about the book’s title, which points to one of my own persistent doubts about poetry in translation. Wouldn’t you agree that there is no such thing as an international poem? A poem can only be written in one language, just as it can only be written by one person at a given moment in history. This is, in fact, one of the great themes of twentieth-century poetry, as your anthology makes very clear—the obligation of the poet to his place and time. As opposed to Symbolist and Modernist poetry, which made art a separate kingdom, most twentieth-century poets reacted to the horrors of the age by insisting, as a matter of moral and aesthetic honor, that they too are casualties of history. This is a central concern of Czeslaw Milosz, whose “Bobo’s Metamorphosis” you include: “In every pocket he carried pencils, pads of paper / Together with crumbs of bread, the accidents of life.” For more…

For almost thirty years, the present, in our country, has been a disoriented time. I mean a time that does not offer its youth, especially the youth of the popular classes, any principle to orient existence. What is the precise character of this disorientation? One of its foremost operations consists in always making illegible the previous sequence, that sequence which was well and truly oriented. This operation is characteristic of all reactive, counter-revolutionary periods, like the one we’ve been living through ever since the end of the seventies. We can for example note that the key feature of the Thermidorean reaction, after the plot of 9 Thermidor and the execution without trial of the Jacobin leaders, was to make illegible the previous Robespierrean sequence: its reduction to the pathology of some blood-thirsty criminals impeded any political understanding. This view of things lasted for decades, and it aimed lastingly to disorient the people, which was considered to be, as it always is, potentially revolutionary.

To make a period illegible is much more than to simply condemn it. One of the effects of illegibility is to make it impossible to find in the period in question the very principles capable of remedying its impasses. If the period is declared to be pathological, nothing can be extracted from it for the sake of orientation, and the conclusion, whose pernicious effects confront us every day, is that one must resign oneself to disorientation as a lesser evil. Let us therefore pose, with regard to a previous and visibly closed sequence of the politics of emancipation, that it must remain legible for us, independently of the final judgment about it.

In the debate concerning the rationality of the French Revolution during the Third Republic, Clemenceau produced a famous formula: ‘The French Revolution forms a bloc’. This formula is noteworthy because it declares the integral legibility of the process, whatever the tragic vicissitudes of its unfolding may have been. Today, it is clear that it is with reference to communism that the ambient discourse transforms the previous sequence into an opaque pathology. I take it upon myself therefore to say that the communist sequence, including all of its nuances, in power as well as in opposition, which lay claim to the same idea, also forms a bloc. More…

The most recent issue, Volume 7, Number 12 , of The International Journal of the Humanities includes:

• The Politics of International Education by Melville Miranda.
• Permitting Beauty in Architectural Education by Ehud Belferman and Iris Aravot.
• The Importance of Non-Government Organizations in the Corporate Social Movement in China by Maria Lai-Ling Lam, Alice Lai-Heung Lam and Lewis Hon-Chung Lam.
• A Possible Strategy for Developing and Supporting Relevant Research in the Humanities: The Case of Stellenbosch University, South Africa by Maryke Hunter-Husselmann.
• The Study on Layout Styles and Patterns of Passports in Qing Dynasty by Tun-Chih Chang.
• The Role of Technology in Creative Productions by José Moreno Arenas and Pedro Almodóvar: Keep the Change, Doll and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown by Polly J. Hodge.

From n+1 magazine:

To read the 1,802 pages of the Swedish crime novelist Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy is to be told that, for all their perceived virtue, the institutions of social democracy are a farce. In Larsson’s books, American readers will find the Sweden they expect: the welfare-state comforts, Volvo security, and Ikea practicality for which the country is known. But they will also find a country they didn’t expect. In this Sweden, the country’s well-polished façade belies a broken apparatus of government whose rusty flywheels are little more than the playthings of crooks. The doctors are crooked. The bureaucrats are crooked. The newspapermen are crooked. The industrialists and businessmen, laid bare by merciless transparency laws, are nevertheless crooked. The police and the prosecutors are crooked. And the criminals, of course, are crooked, though not always: it’s often the case that criminal acts committed by do-gooders in the name of justice—from petty larceny to massive bank fraud—are the only means by which to overcome the comprehensive failure of the world’s most comprehensive welfare system. More…

From It’s Nice That:

Feminist Press is an independent nonprofit publisher based in New York. Founded in 1970, they have a wide variety of material that ranges from fiction to feminist theory. Promoting freedom of expression and social justice, they now own a great collection of books from around the world and from diverse racial and class backgrounds, as well as a section on African Women’s Writing.

Recommended reading, Waiting, a novel by Goretti Kyomuhendo.

The final issue of Volume 7 of The International Journal of the Humanities has now been published.

Volume 7, Number 12 includes:

• A Socialist Feminist Reading of Doris Lessing’s the Grass is Singing by Wan Roselezam Wan Yahya and Pedram Lalbakhsh.
• Cultural Identity Past and Present: Poetic Imagination of Muhammad Haji Salleh by Wan Roselezam Wan Yahya and Pedram Lalbakhsh.
• Open for All: Open Spaces and New Urban Lifestyles by Kin Wai Michael Siu.
• The Gifts of Forgiveness by Rungpat Roengpitya.
• Malaysia’s Model of Political Coalition: What does Majority Win Mean? by Saadon Awang.
• The Rebirth of Phoenix: A Dying Cultures Chinese Opera by Thomas C. Blair, Meng-Dar Shieh, Kuo-Hsiang Chen and Shang-chia Chiou.

Reclaim Your Self: The Complexity of Identity

Socrates once asked the simple question - “Who am I?” For thousands of years, philosophers, theologians, scientists and psychologists have contemplated the answer to this question. In a modern world filled with distractions, an individual is more prone to disillusionment. Self-knowledge, the foundation for physical, spiritual, and mental growth, nurtures confidence and builds a defense system against despair. Awareness and knowledge of the self is crucial to proper overall development.

The author examines definitions of the self given by physicalists, scientific realists and the cognitive method of Bernard Lonergan, S.J. who defines the self as a rational and spiritual being. Examples of near-death experiences and temporal lobe epilepsy will be used to help explain the different theories.

The author thoroughly discusses the importance of self-knowledge in every dimension of human growth and encourages the reader to reclaim the desire to know the self.

The most recent issue, Volume 7, Number 11, of The International Journal of the Humanities includes:

• The Cinematic Transformation in Post-Socialist China: A Case Study of Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower by Lunpeng Ma.
• Is History Just a Collection of Biographies? Notes from a Military Historical Database by William Acres.
• Adolescents’ Perceptions about Coping with Stress: A Qualitative View from India by Sangeeta Chaudhary and Priya Mary Joseph.
• Globalization and Teaching The Contemporary: Including Important Avant-garde Contributions to the International Art Arena from the People’s Republic of China by Jean Ippolito.
• Not Understanding Everyday Life: Remaining an Outsider in Enigmatic Modern China by Lili Hernández.

By Daniyal Mueenuddin From The Washington Post…

Because of Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Rohinton Mistry, to mention just a few of the most prominent authors, American readers have long been able to enjoy one terrific Indian novel after another. But Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is likely to be the first widely read book by a Pakistani writer. Mueenuddin spent his early childhood in Pakistan, then lived in the United States — he attended Dartmouth and Yale — and has since returned to his father’s homeland, where he and his wife now manage a farm in Khanpur. These connected stories show us what life is like for both the rich and the desperately poor in Mueenuddin’s country, and the result is a kind of miniaturized Pakistani “human comedy.”

In the original Comédie humaine, Balzac had the ingenious notion of tying his various novels together by using recurrent characters. Eugène de Rastignac is the protagonist of Le Père Goriot but is subsequently glimpsed in passing or sometimes just referred to in several other books. In like fashion, Mueenuddin interlaces eight stories, while also linking them to the household of a wealthy and self-satisfied landowner named K.K. Harouni. In “Saleema,” for instance, Harouni’s elderly valet, Rafik, falls into a heartbreaking affair with a young maidservant, and we remember this, with a catch in our throat, when in another story we see him bring in two glasses of whiskey on a silver tray. In “Our Lady of Paris,” we discover that Harouni’s nephew is madly in love with a young American woman named Helen; later on, we discover that he is married — to an American named Sonya. More…