Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams

Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams PDF Author: Mark Ford
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501724142
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Raymond Roussel, one of the most outlandishly compelling literary figures of modern times, died in mysterious circumstances at the age of fifty-six in 1933. The story Mark Ford tells about Roussel's life and work is at once captivating, heartbreaking, and almost beyond belief. Could even Proust or Nabokov have invented a character as strange and memorable as the exquisite dandy and graphomaniac this book brings to life? Roussel's poetry, novels, and plays influenced the work of many well-known writers and artists: Jean Cocteau found in him "genius in its pure state," while Salvador Dalí, who died with a copy of Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique on his bedside table, believed him to be one of France's greatest writers ever. Edmond Rostand, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Michel Foucault, and Alain Robbe-Grillet all testified to the power of his unique imagination. By any standards, Roussel led an extraordinary life. Tremendously wealthy, he took two world tours during which he hardly left his hotel rooms. He never wore his clothes more than twice, and generally avoided conversation because he dreaded that it might turn morbid. Ford, himself a poet, traces the evolution of Roussel's bizarre compositional methods and describes the idiosyncrasies of a life structured as obsessively as Roussel structured his writing.

Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams

Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams PDF Author: Mark Ford
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501724142
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Raymond Roussel, one of the most outlandishly compelling literary figures of modern times, died in mysterious circumstances at the age of fifty-six in 1933. The story Mark Ford tells about Roussel's life and work is at once captivating, heartbreaking, and almost beyond belief. Could even Proust or Nabokov have invented a character as strange and memorable as the exquisite dandy and graphomaniac this book brings to life? Roussel's poetry, novels, and plays influenced the work of many well-known writers and artists: Jean Cocteau found in him "genius in its pure state," while Salvador Dalí, who died with a copy of Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique on his bedside table, believed him to be one of France's greatest writers ever. Edmond Rostand, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Michel Foucault, and Alain Robbe-Grillet all testified to the power of his unique imagination. By any standards, Roussel led an extraordinary life. Tremendously wealthy, he took two world tours during which he hardly left his hotel rooms. He never wore his clothes more than twice, and generally avoided conversation because he dreaded that it might turn morbid. Ford, himself a poet, traces the evolution of Roussel's bizarre compositional methods and describes the idiosyncrasies of a life structured as obsessively as Roussel structured his writing.

Impressions of Africa

Impressions of Africa PDF Author: Raymond Roussel
Publisher: Calder Publications
ISBN: 9780714548586
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
The first of Roussel's two major prose works, Impressions of Africa is not, as the title may suggest, a conventional travel account, but an adventure story put together in a highly individual fashion and with an unusual time sequence, whereby the reader is even made to choose whether to begin with the first or the tenth chapter. A veritable literary melting pot, Roussel's groundbreaking text makes ample use of wordplay and the surrealist techniques of automatic writing and private allusion.

Locus Solus

Locus Solus PDF Author: Raymond Roussel
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811226468
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
An intoxicating sui generis novel by “the greatest mesmerist of modern times” (André Breton) The wealthy scientist Martial Canterel guides a group of visitors through his expansive estate, Locus Solus, where he displays his various deranged inventions, each more spectacular than the last. First, he introduces a machine propelled by the weather, which constructs a mosaic out of varying hues of human teeth, then shows a hairless cat charged with a powerful electric battery, and next a bizarre theater in which corpses are reanimated with a special serum to enact the most important movements of their past lives. Wondrously imaginative and narrated with Roussel’s deadpan wit, Locus Solus is unlike anything else ever written.

How I Wrote Certain of My Books

How I Wrote Certain of My Books PDF Author: Raymond Roussel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Introduction by John Ashberry The most eccentric writer of the twentieth century. His unearthly style fascinated Surrealists such as Breton, Duchamp and Cocteau but also Gide, Robespierre, Foucault and John Ashberry. The title essay is the key to Roussel's methods and is joined by selections from his major fiction, drama, and poetry pieces superbly translated by his New York School admirers, which include Ashberry, Winkfield, Harry Matthews and Kenneth Koch.

New Impressions of Africa

New Impressions of Africa PDF Author: Raymond Roussel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400838223
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
A new translation of a masterpiece of modernist poetry Poet, novelist, playwright, and chess enthusiast, Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) was one of the French belle époque's most compelling literary figures. During his lifetime, Roussel's work was vociferously championed by the surrealists, but never achieved the widespread acclaim for which he yearned. New Impressions of Africa is undoubtedly Roussel's most extraordinary work. Since its publication in 1932, this weird and wonderful poem has slowly gained cult status, and its admirers have included Salvador Dalì—who dubbed it the most "ungraspably poetic" work of the era—André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, Michel Foucault, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery. Roussel began writing New Impressions of Africa in 1915 while serving in the French Army during the First World War and it took him seventeen years to complete. "It is hard to believe the immense amount of time composition of this kind of verse requires," he later commented. Mysterious, unnerving, hilarious, haunting, both rigorously logical and dizzyingly sublime, it is truly one of the hidden masterpieces of twentieth-century modernism. This bilingual edition of New Impressions of Africa presents the original French text and the English poet Mark Ford's lucid, idiomatic translation on facing pages. It also includes an introduction outlining the poem's peculiar structure and evolution, notes explaining its literary and historical references, and the fifty-nine illustrations anonymously commissioned by Roussel, via a detective agency, from Henri-A. Zo.

Selections from Certain of His Books

Selections from Certain of His Books PDF Author: Raymond Roussel
Publisher: Serpent's Tail
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
SELECTIONS FROM CERTAIN OF HIS BOOKS ATLAS ANTHOLOGY 7 Compiled under the editorship of Alastair Brotchie, this volume collects together four of Roussel's most important works: 'Documents to Serve as an Outline', a novel translated by John Ashbery, 'The Dust of Suns', a play translated by Harry Mathews, 'The Star on the Forehead', a play translated by Martin Sorrell, and 'The View', a poem translated by Antony Melville.

Raymond Roussel

Raymond Roussel PDF Author: François Caradec
Publisher: Atlas Press (GB)
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Atlas Arkhive 8 Translated by Ian Monk The major biography of this extraordinary French poet, novelist, playwright, musician, homosexual, drug addict and probable suicide. Based on intensive research and access to a large hoard of Roussel's personal papers, diaries and photographs that only came to light in 1989, it fully details his bizarre life, his relationship with the surrealists and other avant-garde literary movements as well as such figures as Proust and Cocteau. Illustrated.

The Alley of Fireflies and Other Stories

The Alley of Fireflies and Other Stories PDF Author: Raymond Roussel
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780998829098
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Fiction. Short Stories. Translated from the French by Mark Ford. Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) is one of the most distinctive and compelling French writers of the twentieth century, yet many aspects of Roussel's life remain shrouded in mystery. An extremely wealthy and always exquisitely dressed homosexual dandy, Roussel was also a compulsive writer. Despite the strangeness of his work, he was convinced that it would make him as popular as Victor Hugo or Shakespeare. His suicide at the age of 56 was in part prompted by the continual disappointment of his hopes for fame. The full extent of Roussel's writing only became clear in 1989 when a trunk was unearthed in a furniture warehouse containing a vast trove of his manuscripts. The most exciting discoveries were the full draft of Locus Solus (over twice as long as the published version) and the typescript of what would have been his third novel, THE ALLEY OF FIREFLIES, which is translated here for the first time into English by the leading Roussel scholar, Mark Ford. Ford has also translated two haunting extracts from the drafts of Locus Solus, and versions of two of the young Roussel's most intriguing short stories, Chiquenaude and AMONG THE BLACKS. Roussel's work was vociferously championed by Surrealist writers and painters such as André Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dalì, and later proved a significant influence on Oulipians (particularly Georges Perec), on nouveaux romanciers like Alain Robbe-Grillet, as well as on John Ashbery and Harry Mathews, who named their pioneering magazine of the 1960s Locus Solus, after Roussel's second novel.

The Dust of Suns

The Dust of Suns PDF Author: Raymond Roussel
Publisher: Atlas Press (GB)
ISBN: 9781900565561
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This play by Roussel is not really a play, but a series of bizarre narratives cut up and distributed among the cast. It should be read as a novel, a novel as strange as anything he wrote, in other words very strange indeed.The Dust of Suns is the second of two plays Roussel wrote in response to heavy criticism of his previous 'adaptations'. Championed by Marcel Duchamp, yet still popularly unsuccessful, Roussel died impoverished and in suspicious circumstances shortly afterwards.

Death and the Labyrinth

Death and the Labyrinth PDF Author: Michel Foucault
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441175369
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Death and the Labyrinth is unique, being Foucault's only work on literature. For Foucault this was "by far the book I wrote most easily and with the greatest pleasure". Here, Foucault explores theory, criticism and psychology through the texts of Raymond Roussel, one of the fathers of experimental writing, whose work has been celebrated by the likes of Cocteau, Duchamp, Breton, Robbe Grillet, Gide and Giacometti. This revised edition includes an introduction, chronology and bibliography to Foucault's work by James Faubion, an interview with Foucault, conducted only nine months before his death, and concludes with an essay on Roussel by the poet John Ashbery.