Ten essays on literature, competition, curiosity, enthusiasm, and truth from the teacher who inspired "The Dead Poet's Society" reveal the joys of teaching and the power of innovation over stale formalism.

A quintessential work of 1960s European art cinema, L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad, 1961) was a collaboration between director Alain Resnais and 'New Novel' enfant terrible Alain Robbe-Grillet. Three people, known only by their initials, move through the sprawling luxury of a mysterious hotel and its ornamental gardens. Perhaps M is A's husband and X her lover. Perhaps, 'last year', A promised X she would leave with him. Or is there something more terrible in the past? An abstract thriller, a love story, a philosophical puzzle, 'the film's deviations are', for Jean-Louis Leutrat, 'as complex as those of the human heart'.

The 1961 film Last Year in Marienbad broke with traditional structures of time, location, and causality like no other film before it. The director, Alain Resnais, played with an artistic language in which the style itself became the content. In doing so, he defined an appreciation of art that has extended into the present day: Nouvelle Vague. The catalogue examines the influence of the film on the fine arts, on Pop culture and fashion, garnering international approaches from the beginning of the twentieth century through to the present.

From the last decades of the nineteenth century through the late 1930s, the West Bohemian spa towns of Carlsbad, Franzensbad, and Marienbad were fashionable destinations for visitors wishing to "take a cure"—to drink the waters, bathe in the mud, be treated by the latest X-ray, light, or gas therapies, or simply enjoy the respite afforded by elegant parks and comfortable lodgings. These were sociable and urbane places, settings for celebrity sightings, match-making, and stylish promenading. Originally the haunt of aristocrats, the spa towns came to be the favored summer resorts for the emerging bourgeoisie. Among the many who traveled there, a very high proportion were Jewish. In Next Year in Marienbad, Mirjam Zadoff writes the social and cultural history of Carlsbad, Franzensbad, and Marienbad as Jewish spaces. Secular and religious Jews from diverse national, cultural, and social backgrounds mingled in idyllic and often apolitical-seeming surroundings. During the season, shops sold Yiddish and Hebrew newspapers, kosher kitchens were opened, and theatrical presentations, concerts, and public readings catered to the Jewish clientele. Yet these same resorts were situated in a region of growing hostile nationalisms, and they were towns that might turn virulently anti-Semitic in the off season. Next Year in Marienbad draws from memoirs and letters, newspapers and maps, novels and postcards to create a compelling and engaging portrait of Jewish presence and cultural production in the years between the fin de siècle and the Second World War.

Alain Robbe-Grillet had traditionally been seen as an austere experimentalist in fiction, addicted to arid and interminable descriptions of objects like coffee pots, erasers and pieces of string. His own rather bellicose theoretical pronouncements were partly to blame for this unattractive picture, belied by the immense popular success of the film Last Year at Marienbad (1961) (made by Alain Resnais from Robbe-Grillet’s script) and the high critical esteem in which novels like Jealousy and The Voyeur are held. In his original study, first published in 1983, John Fletcher attempts to resolve this paradox by offering a new interpretation of Robbe-Grillet’s work which stresses the subversive qualities of his imagination and the disturbing power of his vision of a world of labyrinths and bizarre sexual stereotypes, haunted by images of love and loss.

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Exiled on a deserted island, a Christ-haunted journalist-turned-filmmaker attempts to persuade a married women from his past to help him produce a science-fiction-themed pastiche to the 1960s French New Wave classic, "Last Year at Marienbad." Through this act of artistic creation, he expects to carry out the will of God by prophesizing the death of time and the birth of a new religion. If only he can make the woman remember him... "Marienbad My Love" is the world's longest novel, a multi-million-word, multiple-volume work meticulously assembled through calculation and chance from fragments of pre-existing texts both written and appropriated by Mark Leach over the course of 30 years - "the movie," as Leach calls it, "of all my labors and all my inspirations."