scholarly journals Elogio de lo inútil: creación poética y tecnologías digitales

COMeIN ◽  
2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amalia Creus
Keyword(s):  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Paul Auster

El arte es inútil. No lo digo yo, lo dijo Oscar Wilde. También lo diría más tarde Paul Auster, hablando de literatura: “Sin duda es una extraña manera de pasarse la vida: encerrado en una habitación con la pluma en la mano, hora tras hora, día tras día, año tras año, esforzándose por llenar unas cuartillas de palabras con el objeto de dar vida a lo que no existe, salvo en la propia imaginación”.

Literature in Our Time, or, Loving Literature to Bits

CounterText ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Callus
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
Don Quixote ◽  
Time Machine ◽  
Paul Auster ◽  
Anne Michaels

In this essay Ivan Callus provides some reflections on literature in the present. He considers the tenability of the post-literary label and looks at works that might be posited as having some degree of countertextual affinity. The essay, while not setting itself up as a creative piece, deliberately structures itself unconventionally. It frames its argument within twenty-one sections that are self-contained but that also echo each other in their attempt to develop an overarching argument which draws out some of the challenges that lie before the countertextual and the post-literary. Punctuating the essay and contributing to its unconventional take on the practice of literary criticism is a series of exercises for the reader to complete, if so wished; the essay makes no attempt, however, to suggest that a countertextual criticism ought to make a routine of such devices. The separate sections contain reflections on a number of texts and writers, among them, and in order of appearance, Hamlet, Anthony Trollope, Jacques Derrida, The Time Machine, Don Quixote, Mark Z. Danielewski, Mark B. N. Hansen, Gunter Kress, Scott's Reliquiae Trotcosienses, W. B. Yeats, Kate Tempest, David Jones, Anne Michaels, Bernice Eisenstein, Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee, Billy Collins, Deidre Shauna Lynch, Tim Parks, Tom McCarthy – and Hamlet again. The essay's length fulfils a performative function but also facilitates as extensive a catalogue of aspects of the countertextual in literature and elsewhere as is feasible or as might be dared at this stage.

Wilde Crimes: The Art of Murder and Decadent (Homo)Sexuality in Gyles Brandreth's Oscar Wilde Series

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-182
Author(s):  
Susanne Gruss
Keyword(s):  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
The Real ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Historical Detail

Gyles Brandreth's Oscar Wilde novels (2007–12) appropriate Wilde for a neo-Victorian crime series in which the sharp-witted aestheticist serves as a detective à la Sherlock Holmes. This article explores Brandreth's art of adapting Wilde (both the man and the works) and English decadent culture on several levels. The novels can, of course, be read as traditional crime mysteries: while readers follow Wilde as detective, they are simultaneously prompted to decipher the ‘truth’ of biographical and cultural/historical detail. At the same time, the mysteries revolve around Wilde's scandalous (homo)sexuality and thus his masculinity. The novels remain curiously cautious when it comes to the depiction of Wilde as homosexual: all novels showcase Wilde's marriage, Constance's virtues, and Oscar's love for his children, and the real ‘Somdomites’ are the murderers he pursues. By portraying these criminals and their crimes, the novels evade the less comfortable, transgressive aspects of Wilde's sexuality and help to reduce him to a thoroughly amusing decadent suitable for a general reading public. Brandreth's novels can therefore be read as a decidedly conservative account of Wilde's masculinity for the market of neo-Victorian fiction.

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