Featured Readings in "Rhapsody in Letters"

“In 1947, Max Bense refines the argument in postwar terms that would be especially important to the multilayered form of [essay] film by noting: ‘The essayist is a combiner, a tireless producer of configurations around a specific object ... Configuration is an epistemological arrangement which cannot be achieved through axiomatic deduction, but only through literary ars combinatoria, in which imagination replaces strict knowledge’ (422). Like configurations of fragments in a kaleidoscope or cinematic montage, the essay offers, for Bense, a creative rearrangement and play ‘of idea and image’ (423-424), comparable to Benjamin’s ‘constellations’ of knowledge in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, in which ‘ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars.’”—Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker

FEATURED READINGS in Rhapsody in Letters:

• Theodor W. Adorno, The Essay as Form

• César Aira, The New Writing

• Anonymous, Ecclesiastes

• Naomi S. Baron and Nikhil Bhattacharya, The Limits of Language

• Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse

• Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

• The Beatles, Carry That Weight

• Roberto Benigni, La tigre e la neve

• Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama

• Leonard Bernstein on Rhapsody in Blue(Atlantic Monthly, 1955)

• Jorge Luis Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"

• Robert Bringhurst, What Is Reading For?

• Richard Brody, Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard

• Anne Carson, Nay Rather

• Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee

• Julio Cortázar, Cronopios and Famas

• Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker

• Richard Ellmann, James Joyce

• Northrop Frye, What Is Reading For?

• Ernest Hemingway, Baby Shoes

• Ernest Hemingway, The Paris Review interview

• Jim Jarmusch, Things I've Learned

• James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

• Talib Kweli, Get By

• Luke Lalonde (Born Ruffians), Skeleton Me

• Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

• Ramon Llull, Doctor Illuminatus: A Ramon Llull Reader

• George Mallory, Climbing Everest

• George Mallory, New York Times feautre

• Dudley M. Marchi, Montaigne among the Postmoderns: Chaillou and Sollers Reading the Essais

• Jelly Roll Morton, Library of Congress interviews with Alan Lomax

• Mother Goose, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall

• Margot Norris, The Consequence of Deconstruction

• Frank O'Hara, Selected Poems

• Nicanor Parra, Antipoems, New and Selected

• Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

• Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud Complete

• Sappho, 7 Greeks

• Marcelle Sauvageot, Commentary

• William Shakespeare, Hamlet

• Frank Sinatra, That's Life

• William Irwin Thompson, The Language of "Finnegans Wake"

• Agnès Varda, The Beaches of Agnès

• Agnès Varda, The Gleaners and I

• Donald Phillip Verene, ed., Vico and Joyce

• Giambattista Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians

• Kanye West, Power

• Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass