When authors are interviewed about their books or themselves, much more is going on than a simple conversation. The interview becomes a performance space for authorial orchestration and self-promotion, and interviewers in turn respond to such self-display and theatrics. Featuring absorbing conversations with nine well-known authors, including poets Richard Howard and Gerald Stern, novelist Isabel Allende, and scholar-intellectual Camille Paglia, Performing the Literary Interview is the first in-depth look at this type of performance art. Interviews with poets, fiction writers, and...
When authors are interviewed about their books or themselves, much more is going on than a simple conversation. The interview becomes a performance sp...
This book presents a compilation of Irving Howe's interviews during the last fifteen years of his life. It represents what could be viewed as the sequel to Howe's intellectual autobiography, "A Margin of Hope", which took the story of his life only up to the late 1970s. Many of these interviews were never published and have existed only as personal tapes in the hands of such scholars and activists as Todd Gitlin and Maurice Isserman. Others were originally published in such venues as "The New York Times", "The Jerusalem Post", and the PBS documentary "Arguing the World". Howe never organized...
This book presents a compilation of Irving Howe's interviews during the last fifteen years of his life. It represents what could be viewed as the sequ...
George Orwell has been embraced, adopted, and co-opted by everyone from the far left to the neoconservatives. Each succeeding generation of Anglo-American intellectuals has felt compelled to engage the life, work, and cultural afterlife of Orwell, who is considered by many to have been the foremost political writer of the twentieth century. Every Intellectual's Big Brother explores the ways in which numerous disparate groups, Orwell's intellectual "siblings," have adapted their views of Orwell to fit their own agendas and how in doing so they have changed our perceptions of...
George Orwell has been embraced, adopted, and co-opted by everyone from the far left to the neoconservatives. Each succeeding generation of Anglo-A...
The year 1984 is just a memory, but the catchwords of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four still routinely pepper public discussions of topics ranging from government surveillance and privacy invasion to language corruption and bureaucratese. Orwell's work pervades the cultural imagination, while others of his literary generation are long forgotten. Exploring this astonishing afterlife has become the scholarly vocation of John Rodden, who is now the leading authority on the reception, impact, and reinvention of George Orwell--the man and writer--as well as of "Orwell"...
The year 1984 is just a memory, but the catchwords of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four still routinely pepper public discuss...
If one wants to know what children in communist East Europe were told to think about their nation and their leaders, their class enemy, and their so-called Soviet friends, no better source exists than textbooks. In textbooks the dogmas of communism were communicated in their most simplified form and manufactured in the millions for mass consumption. In Textbook Reds, John Rodden shows how the now-defunct German Democratic Republic (GDR) shaped generations of East German youth and how the imprint of Marxist-Leninist ideology remains today on the hearts and minds of millions of...
If one wants to know what children in communist East Europe were told to think about their nation and their leaders, their class enemy, and their s...
Spy romances of Cold War counterespionage evoke scenes of heroic FBI and CIA agents dedicated to smashing communism and its subversive coterie of intellectual fellow travelers bent on painting the world red. John Rodden cuts this tall tale down to its authentic pint size, refusing to indulge the public relations myth promoted by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. In Of G-Men and Eggheads, Rodden portrays federal agents' hilarious obsession with monitoring that ever-present threat to national security, the American literary intellectual. Drawing on government dossiers and archives, Rodden focuses on the...
Spy romances of Cold War counterespionage evoke scenes of heroic FBI and CIA agents dedicated to smashing communism and its subversive coterie of inte...
Spy romances of Cold War counterespionage evoke scenes of heroic FBI and CIA agents dedicated to smashing communism and its subversive coterie of intellectual fellow travelers bent on painting the world red. John Rodden cuts this tall tale down to its authentic pint size, refusing to indulge the public relations myth promoted by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. In Of G-Men and Eggheads, Rodden portrays federal agents' hilarious obsession with monitoring that ever-present threat to national security, the American literary intellectual. Drawing on government dossiers and archives, Rodden...
Spy romances of Cold War counterespionage evoke scenes of heroic FBI and CIA agents dedicated to smashing communism and its subversive coterie of inte...
Between Self and Society explores the psychosocial dramas that galvanize six major British novels written between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. The book challenges an influential misconception that has for too long hindered appreciation of the psychological novel. John Rodden argues that there should be no simplifying antithesis between psychological, "inner" conflicts (within the mind or "soul") and institutional, "outer" conflicts (within family, class, community). Instead, it is the overarching, dramatic--yet often tortuous--relations between self and society that...
Between Self and Society explores the psychosocial dramas that galvanize six major British novels written between the eighteenth and twentie...