'After Paradise: Essays on the Fate of American Writing' lays bare the richness of classic American texts and their fraught relationship with what Jon Thompson sees as a culture of violence and war. Focusing on William Bradford's 'Of Plymouth Plantation', Herman Melville's 'Bartleby the Scrivener', Walt Whitman's 'Specimen Days', Emily Dickinson's 'Letters' and Michael Herr's 'Dispatches', 'After Paradise' offers a series of moving, interconnected reflections upon what Thompson calls "the fate of American writing." Part cultural reflection, part lyrical criticism, part idiosyncratic literary...
'After Paradise: Essays on the Fate of American Writing' lays bare the richness of classic American texts and their fraught relationship with what Jon...
Studies in Classic American Literature ...] is at once a work of cultural criticism, a study and critique of American myths, a meditation on the relationship between the Old World and the New, a new theory of the self, a theory of textuality (and a fearless demonstration of a radical, self-styled form of psycho-social criticism), a theory of art, a history of America, a critique of the Enlightenment and one of the greatest covert autobiographies in world literature (all the writers in the book represent either versions of Lawrence's self or versions of himself he felt he had to liberate)....
Studies in Classic American Literature ...] is at once a work of cultural criticism, a study and critique of American myths, a meditation on the rela...
Poetry. "LANDSCAPE WITH LIGHT, a subtle and gorgeous book of cinematic ekphrasis, asks an important question about the nature of visual culture: 'Do we still worship the old god of beauty, or have we created a new one..." The repurposing of light is clear here, making fluid recalibrations of seeing and feeling into luminous phrases; capturing a form of organic thought in motion pictures. In a language at once illustrative and occult, Jon Thompson is questing for a higher light." Peter Gizzi"
Poetry. "LANDSCAPE WITH LIGHT, a subtle and gorgeous book of cinematic ekphrasis, asks an important question about the nature of visual culture: 'Do w...
Fascinated by strangeness that's made in the U.S.A.--its beliefs and organization, its affinity for violence and its elusive relationship with the past--Strange Country lyrically addresses itself to defining American landscapes/dreamscapes, and to their unaccountable beauty.
"In Strange Country Jon Thompson addresses the voices, amongst others, of 'the traffic of fear', and bids their speakers join the living. It is also an invitation to the reader to enter a specifically American poetry of the here-and-now. The accomplishment of Strange Country begins with the...
Fascinated by strangeness that's made in the U.S.A.--its beliefs and organization, its affinity for violence and its elusive relationship with the ...
