Francis Ponge boldly proclaims his poetic goal in Mute Objects of Expression: "To accept the challenge that objects offer to language." These objects—less chosen than received spontaneously—are perceived with inimitable Pongean humor and rendered into glimmering still lifes. He gives voice to the often unnoticed aspects of natural objects and beings. Shunning familiar poetic modes, Ponge forges new visions, images drawn from nature, from mythology and the classics. In this volume, springing from the Loire countryside in the early 1940s, Ponge’s "prôems" recall the violent perfume of the mimosa, the cries of carnations, and the flirtations of wasps. From a small note- book, his sole supply of paper withinthe wartime deprivations, he composes repeated drafts of an innovative form combining poetry with analysis and impish play. Despite the demoralizing clouds of Occupation, Ponge wrests a soaring paean to his beloved sliver of Provence.

Subject: Visible and invisible -- Apples and oranges -- Desire and loss -- The theater as a visual arrt -- Afterword

Spoiled Distinctions investigates crises of evaluation in twentieth-century France. Taking Marcel Proust as its central figure, the book theorizes the disorienting force of everyday aesthetic experience. In a series of surprising readings, Hannah Freed-Thall frees Proust from his reputation as the most refined of high modernists. The author of In Search of Lost Time appears here as a journalist and newspaper enthusiast, a literary ventriloquist and connoisseur of popular scandals, and a writer attentive to the unsophisticated phenomenology of the here and now. The final chapters of the book consider the legacy of Proust's experiments with inestimable worth. Authors Francis Ponge, Nathalie Sarraute, and Yasmina Reza also explore the underside of cultural distinction. With Proust, they elaborate modernist variations on the beautiful and sublime--from nuance to the "whatever" and from the awkward to the sickly-sweet. Spoiled Distinctions thus revitalizes the critical discourse on aesthetics. Mapping the intersection of phenomenology, aesthetic theory, and the sociology of culture, the book reveals how enchanting the ordinary can be.

The Riddle in the Poem is a study of the ramifications of riddles and riddle elements in the context of selected twentieth-century poetry. It includes works by Francis Ponge, Wallace Stevens, Richard Wilbur, Rainer M. Rilke, and Henrikas Radauskas. This book enlarges the scope of riddles as a "root of lyric" by connecting it with the folkloristic concept of "riddling," essentially a question and answer series, and by tracing the influence of the root in poetic methodology. The Riddle in the Poem may be defined as an attempt to advance the notion, which has been discussed in previous folkloristic and literary studies, which riddle as the root of lyric manifests itself in various ways.

Based on Foucault's 1978 and 1979 lectures on rationalities of government, this work examines the art or activity of government and the different ways in which it has been made thinkable and practicable. There are also contributions of other scholars exploring modern manifestations of government.

"We have extensive accounts, typed out neatly: 'They took me into a dark room and started hitting me on the head and stomach and legs. I stayed in this room for 5 days, naked, with no clothes.'" Angela Woodward's novel Ink tells the story of the two women who spend their days doing that neat typing. Sylvia and Marina, both single mothers, work in a suburban office building, transcribing tape recordings of witness statements describing detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib. Their ordinary preoccupations—problems with the soap in the restroom, the motives of Marina's new love, Mr. Right, and Sylvia's worries about paying for her son's show choir costume—are a mundane backdrop to the violence represented by the transcripts. Woodward layers essayistic explorations of the history of ink and writing materials into the women's tale along with the story of the unfinished masterpiece of a French poet, and a writer's notations about her daily commute and the lake behind her house. Then a new crime is revealed. Ink is an illuminating meditation on what it means to bear witness.