Portrait of a Man Known as Il Condottiere

Portrait of a Man Known as Il Condottiere PDF Author: Georges Perec
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022605425X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
Portrait of a Man [Il Condottiere] dates from 1957-1960 and is the first novel Perec ever completed: it was rejected by Gallimard and Seuil back when Perec was nobody, so it is ironic that Seuil has brought it out now. Back in 1960, Perec put it away, as he wrote to a friend: Will leave it where it is, for the moment at least. Will take it up again in ten years, and it will either become a masterwork or [I] will wait in my grave for a faithful exegete to find it in an old trunk. The novel was subsequently found by David Bellos, and it is a thriller, combining art forgery and murder. The protagonist (Winkler) devotes months on end to making a fake for a client of the famous painting Il Condottiere by Renaissance artist Antonella da Messina, which is in the Louvre. As classic mysteries begin, this one starts with a murder on the first page: but it is Winkler who murders his client. The novel investigates the motive for the crime: one of its reasons will center on the forger s frustration over his inability to produce a work rivaling the original. The theme of forgery in painting crosses much of Perec s work. And the character Winckler also appears in Life: A User s Manual and in W, or the Remembrance of Childhood. Our version also includes a brief introduction by Bellos."

Portrait of a Man Known as Il Condottiere

Portrait of a Man Known as Il Condottiere PDF Author: Georges Perec
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022605425X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 144

Get Book

Book Description
Portrait of a Man [Il Condottiere] dates from 1957-1960 and is the first novel Perec ever completed: it was rejected by Gallimard and Seuil back when Perec was nobody, so it is ironic that Seuil has brought it out now. Back in 1960, Perec put it away, as he wrote to a friend: Will leave it where it is, for the moment at least. Will take it up again in ten years, and it will either become a masterwork or [I] will wait in my grave for a faithful exegete to find it in an old trunk. The novel was subsequently found by David Bellos, and it is a thriller, combining art forgery and murder. The protagonist (Winkler) devotes months on end to making a fake for a client of the famous painting Il Condottiere by Renaissance artist Antonella da Messina, which is in the Louvre. As classic mysteries begin, this one starts with a murder on the first page: but it is Winkler who murders his client. The novel investigates the motive for the crime: one of its reasons will center on the forger s frustration over his inability to produce a work rivaling the original. The theme of forgery in painting crosses much of Perec s work. And the character Winckler also appears in Life: A User s Manual and in W, or the Remembrance of Childhood. Our version also includes a brief introduction by Bellos."

Portrait of a Man Known as Il Condottiere

Portrait of a Man Known as Il Condottiere PDF Author: Georges Perec
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022605439X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
The posthumously published first novel from the acclaimed French author of Life: A User’s Manual offers “glimpses of Perec’s future greatness” (The New Yorker). Puckish and playful, Georges Perec infused avant-garde and experimental fiction with a wit and wonder that belied the serious concerns and concepts that underpinned it. A prominent member of the OuLiPo, and an abiding influence on fiction writers today, Perec used formal constraints to dazzling effect in such works as A Void—a murder mystery that contains nary an “e”—and Life: A User’s Manual, in which an apartment building, systematically canvassed, unfolds secrets and, ultimately offers a reflection on creation, destruction, and the devotion to art. Before embarking on these experiments, however, Perec tried his hand at a relatively straightforward novel, Portrait of a Man. His first book, it was rejected by publishers when he submitted it in 1960, after which he filed it away. Decades after Perec’s death, David Bellos discovered the manuscript, and through his translation we have a chance to enjoy it in English for the first time. What fans will find here is a thriller that combines themes that would remain prominent in Perec’s later work, such as art forgery, authenticity, and murder, as well as craftsman Gaspard Winckler, who whose namesakes play major roles in Life: A User’s Manual and W, or The Memory of Childhood. Engaging and entertaining on its own merits, and gaining additional interest when set in the context of Perec’s career, Portrait of a Man is sure to charm the many fans of this postmodern master. “Fascinating.” —The Guardian

The Baroque Night

The Baroque Night PDF Author: Spencer Golub
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810137836
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
In The Baroque Night, authorial idiosyncrasy hybridizes the concepts of "baroque" and "noir" across the fields of film, theater, literature, and philosophy, arguing for mental function as form, as an impossible object, a container in which the container itself is the thing contained. The book is an experiment in thinking difference and thinking differently, an ethics of otherness and the abstract. Spencer Golub inverts the unreality of the real and the reality of fiction, exposing the tropes of memory, identity, and authenticity as a scenic route through life that ultimately blocks the view. The Baroque Night draws upon materials that have not previously been included in studies of either the baroque or film noir, while offering new perspectives on other, more familiar sources. Leibniz's concepts of the monad and compossibility provide organizing thought models, and death, fear, and mental illness cast their anamorphic images across surfaces that are deeper and closer than they at first appear. Key characters and situations in the book derive from the works of Alfred Hitchcock, Henri-Georges Clozot, Jean-Pierre Melville, Oscar Wilde, Georges Perec, Patricia Highsmith, William Shakespeare, Jean Racine, Pierre Corneille, and Arthur Conan Doyle, among many others. This is virtuality and reality for the phobic, making it a fascinating and viable document of and episteme for the anxious age in which we (always) find ourselves living, though not yet fully alive. This performance of suspect evidence speaks to and in the ways we are organically inauthentic, the cause of our own causality and our own worst eyewitnesses to all that appears and disappears in space and time.

The Art of the Portrait

The Art of the Portrait PDF Author: Norbert Schneider
Publisher: Taschen
ISBN: 9783822819951
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description


Georges Perec: A Life in Words

Georges Perec: A Life in Words PDF Author: David Bellos
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1409019268
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 866

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Book Description
"It's hard to see how anyone is ever going to better this User's Manual to the life of Georges Perec" - Gilbert Adair, Sunday Times Winner of the Prix Goncourt for Biography, 1994 George Perec (1936-82) was one of the most significant European writers of the twentieth century and undoubtedly the most versatile and innovative writer of his generation. David Bellos's comprehensive biography - which also provides the first full survey of Perec's irreverent, polymathic oeuvre - explores the life of an anguished, comical and endearingly modest man, who worked quietly as an archivist in a medical research library. The French son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, he remained haunted all of his life by his father's death in the war, fighting to defend France, and his mother's in Auschwitz-Birkenau. His acclaimed novel A Void (1969) - written without using the letter "e" - has been seen as an attempt to escape from the words "père", "mere", and even "George Perec". His career made an auspicious start with Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965), which won the Prix Renaudot. He then pursued an idiosyncratic and ambitious literary itinerary through the intellectual ferment of Paris in the 1960s and 1970s.He belonged to the Ouvrior de Littérature Potentielle (OuLiPo), a radically inventive group of writers whose members included Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino. Perec achieved international celebrity with Life A User's Manual (1978), which won the Prix Medicis and was voted Novel of the Decade by the Salon du Livre. He died in his mid-forties after a short illness, leaving a truly puzzling detective novel, 53 Days, incomplete. "Professor Bellos's book enables us at once to relish the most wilfully bizarre aspects of Perec's oeuvre and to understand the whys and wherefores of his protean nature" - Jonathan Romney, Literary Review

Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting

Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting PDF Author: David Alan Brown
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300116779
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Presents a survey of sixty Venetian Renaissance paintings of the calibre of Bellini and Titian's "Feast of the Gods" in Washington and Giorgione's "Laura and Three Philosophers" in Vienna.

Mind the Ghost

Mind the Ghost PDF Author: Sonja Stojanovic
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1800854897
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Spectrality disrupts and fissures our conceptions of time, unmaking and complicating binaries such as life and death, presence and absence, the visible and the invisible, and literality and metaphor. A contribution to current conversations in memory studies and spectrality studies, Mind the Ghost is an experiment in reading ghosts otherwise. It explores, through contemporary fiction in French, sites of textual haunting that take the form of names, lists, objects, photographs, and stains. The book turns to Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous to rethink what constitutes and functions as a ghost, proposing that this figure solicits readers’ investment in mnemonic practices. Considering the memories and legacies of violence that have marked the greater part of the twentieth-century – in Algeria, Bosnia, Croatia, France, and Rwanda – this book traces absences, disappearances and reappearances, textual omissions and untimely irruptions to posit literature’s power to both remember and communicate beyond the bounds of chronological time. Through close readings of recent fiction by Kaouther Adimi, Jakuta Alikavazovic, Gaël Faye, Jérôme Ferrari, Patrick Modiano, Lydie Salvayre, Leïla Sebbar, and Cécile Wajsbrot, Mind the Ghost articulates the mechanisms through which readers themselves become haunted.

Georges Perec’s Geographies

Georges Perec’s Geographies PDF Author: Charles Forsdick
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1787354423
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Georges Perec, novelist, filmmaker and essayist, was one of the most inventive and original writers of the twentieth century. A fascinating aspect of his work is its intrinsically geographical nature. With major projects on space and place, Perec’s writing speaks to a variety of geographical, urban and architectural concerns, both in a substantive way, including a focus on cities, streets, homes and apartments, and in a methodological way, experimenting with methods of urban exploration and observation, classification, enumeration and taxonomy. Georges Perec’s Geographies is the first book to offer a rounded picture of Perec’s geographical interests. Divided into two parts, Part I, Perec’s Geographies, explores the geographies within Perec’s work in film, literature and radio, from descriptions of streets to the spaces of his texts, while Part II, Perecquian Geographies, explores geographies in a range of material and metaphorical forms, including photographic essays, soundscapes, theatre, dance and writing, created by those directly inspired by Perec. Georges Perec’s Geographies extends the body of Perec criticism beyond Literary and French Studies to disciplines including Geography, Urban Studies, Planning and Architecture to offer a complete and systematic examination of Georges Perec’s geographies. The diversity of readings and approaches will be of interest not only to Perec readers and fans but to students and researchers across these subjects.

Exercises in Architecture

Exercises in Architecture PDF Author: Simon Unwin
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100062496X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This revised edition of Exercises in Architecture: Learning to Think as an Architect is full of new content, building on the success of the previous edition. All the original exercises have been revised and new ones added, with the format changing to allow the inclusion of more supplementary material. The aim remains the same, to help pre- or early-course architecture students begin and develop their ability to think as architects. Learning to do architecture is tricky. It involves awakening abilities that remain dormant in most people. It is like learning language for the first time; a task made more mystifying by the fact that architecture deals not in words but in places: places to stand, to walk, to sit, to hide, to sleep, to cook, to eat, to work, to play, to worship... This book was written for those who want to be architects. It suggests a basis for early experiences in a school of architecture; but it could also be used in secondary schools and colleges, or as self-directed preparation for students in the months before entering professional education. Exercises in Architecture builds on and supplements the methodology for architectural analysis presented in the author’s previous book Analysing Architecture: the Universal Language of Place-Making (fifth edition, 2021) and demonstrated in his Twenty-Five Buildings Every Architect Should Understand (Routledge, 2015). Together, the three books, deal with the three aspects of learning any creative discipline: 1. Analysing Architecture provides a methodology for analysis that develops an understanding of the way architecture works; 2. Twenty-Five Buildings explores and extends that methodology through analysis of examples as case studies; and 3. Exercises in Architecture offers a way of expanding understanding and developing fluency by following a range of rudimentary and more sophisticated exercises. Those who wish to become professional architects (wherever in the world they might be) must make a conscious effort to learn the universal language of architecture as place-making, to explore its powers and how they might be used. The exercises in this book are designed to help.

Money Or Love

Money Or Love PDF Author: Barbara Cartland
Publisher: Barbara Cartland EBooks ltd
ISBN: 1908411597
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 135

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Book Description
Sir Robin Dunstead returns from India after his father's death to find that he has inherited two of the largest ancestral houses in England, but no money to restore them. Amazed to find both houses empty of servants and in a state of disrepair he berates himself for not returning home earlier. Stunned to learn that his father has sold everything of value that is not entailed to future generations and squandered the family fortune on selfish pursuits, Robin is left with no income and not even enough money to buy food for himself and his lovely sister, Alena. In complete despair Robin commissions a forger to copy two lesser-known priceless paintings that are entailed for future generations and raise enough money to launch Alena and himself in society in the hope of attracting rich American's dazzled by her beauty and his title. Robin is adamant; they must both marry for money to save the family estate, forgetting any dreams of true love. Their plan seems set to work, until Alena meets a charming artist, Vincent, who shares her appreciation of art but has no fortune. Can she really quash the blossoming feelings she has for Vincent in order to marry a millionaire? Meanwhile, Robin has his own dilemma as he chases a hugely wealthy heiress. Uncomfortable with his new role as a penniless fortune hunter, Robin finds it much harder to compromise his personal values than he ever imagined. As brother and sister struggle with the realities of their decision both are forced to reconsider their choices - personal happiness and poverty, or the financial security that only a wealthy spouse can offer