On the problems of translation in literary study. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability argues for a rethinking of comparative literature focusing on the problems that emerge when large-scale paradigms of literary studies ignore the politics of the “Untranslatable”—the realm of those words that are continually retranslated, mistranslated, transferred from language to language, or especially resistant to substitution. In ...
"A landmark in comparative literature in Britain."—George Steiner, Sunday Times. "Very few men," said Bakunin, «have read as much, and, it may be added, have read as intelligently, as M. Marx.» S. S. Prawer's highly influential work explores how the world of imaginative literature—poems, novels, plays—infused and shaped Marx's writings, from his unpublished correspondence, to his pamphlets and major works. In exploring Marx ...
How to reinvent Lenin in the era of “cultural capitalism.” The idea of a Lenin renaissance might well provoke an outburst of sarcastic laughter. Marx is OK, but Lenin? Doesn’t he stand for the big catastrophe which left its mark on the entire twentieth-century? Lenin, however, deserves wider consideration than this, and his writings of 1917 are testament to a formidable political figure. They reveal his ability to grasp the significance of an e ...
The formation of an unorthodox literary critic. How does a literary historian end up thinking in terms of z-scores, principal component analysis, and clustering coefficient? In the ten essays collected in this volume, Franco Moretti reconstructs the intellectual trajectory of his philosophy of ‘distant reading’. From the evolutionary model of ‘Modern European Literature’, through the geo-cultural dominant of ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ a ...
A passionate meditation on contemporary Arab identity. Before his assassination in 2005, Samir Kassir was one of Lebanon’s foremost public intellectuals. In Being Arab, a thought-provoking assessment of Arab identity, he calls on the people of the Middle East to reject both Western double standards and Islamism in order to take the future into their own hands. Passionately written and brilliantly argued, this rallying cry for change has now bee ...
One of Britain’s foremost political writers confronts ten years of murderous delusion. In 2001, Tony Blair declared that those who opposed the war on terror had been ‘proved wrong’ – along with critics of unfettered corporate power and free market capitalism. Ten years later, the critics have been comprehensively vindicated and the champions of the New World Order proved catastrophically wrong. The evidence on hand includes the disastrous occup ...
The second biggest-selling book ever published. In the two decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, global capitalism became entrenched in its modern, neoliberal form. Its triumph was so complete that the word “capitalism” itself fell out of use in the absence of credible political alternatives. But with the outbreak of financial crisis and global recession in the twenty-first century, capitalism is once again up for discussion. The statu ...
A stellar line-up of fiction writers envision the terrors of impending climate change. The size and severity of the global climate crisis is such that even the most committed environmentalists are liable to live in a state of denial. The award-winning writers collected here have made it their task to shake off this nagging disbelief, bringing the incomprehensible within our grasp and shaping an emotional response to the deterioration of our glo ...
