Barbara Will: Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (2011)

“A study of the friendship between Gertrude Stein and Bernard Faÿ, director of the Bibliothèque Nationale under the collaborationist Vichy government and chief protector of Stein’s interests in France during World War II. From the late 1920s-40s Stein and Faÿ shared a worldview marked by aesthetic radicalism and political conservatism, culminating in Stein’s agreement in 1941, at the suggestion of Faÿ, to translate the speeches of Marshal Philippe Pétain into English. This book reads the Stein-Faÿ relationship as a case study through which to raise larger theoretical questions: about the role of prominent intellectuals in wartime France; about the place of America in the Vichy imagination; about the libidinal promise or threat of fascist ideology for sexual identity; and most importantly, about the intersection of modernism and fascism.”

Publisher Columbia University Press, 2011
Gender and Culture series
ISBN 0231152620, 9780231152624
xviii+274 pages

Reviews: Renate Stendhal (LA Review of Books 2011), Sarah Posman (Modernism/modernity 2012), Richard M. Berrong (Gay and Lesbian Review 2012), Christopher Benfey (New Republic 2012), Michael Kimmelman (NY Review of Books 2012), Angela Kershaw (French Studies 2012), Birgitvan Puymbroeck (Modern Fiction Studies 2013), Karen Leick (H-France 2013).

Publisher
WorldCat

EPUB

See also Gertrude Stein’s war years: Setting the record straight, a dossier edited by Charles Bernstein in May 2012. (added 10 Apr)

J. R. McNeill, Corinna R. Unger (eds.): Environmental Histories of the Cold War (2010)

“This book explores the links between the Cold War and the global environment, ranging from the environmental impacts of nuclear weapons to the political repercussions of environmentalism. Environmental change accelerated sharply during the Cold War years, and so did environmentalism as both a popular movement and a scientific preoccupation. Most Cold War history however entirely overlooks these developments, which were not only simultaneous but also linked together in ways both straightforward and surprising. The contributors to this book present these connected issues as a global phenomenon, with chapters concerning China, the USSR, Europe, North America, Oceania, and elsewhere. The role of experts as agents and advocates of using the environment as a weapon in the Cold War or, contrastingly, of preventing environmental damage resulting from Cold War politics is also given broad attention.”

Publisher Cambridge University Press, 2010
ISBN 0521762448, 9780521762441
362 pages

Reviews: Chaney (H-Net, 2011), Tucker (Michigan War Studies Review, 2012), Kinkela (Cold War History, 2013).
Conference report by Thomas Robertson (GFI Bulletin, 2007)

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (5 MB, updated on 2019-10-11)

Alice Oswald: Memorial: A Version of Homer’s Iliad (2011–)

“In this daring new work, the poet Alice Oswald strips away the narrative of the Iliad—the anger of Achilles, the story of Helen—in favor of attending to its atmospheres: the extended similes that bring so much of the natural order into the poem and the corresponding litany of the war-dead, most of whom are little more than names but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably and unforgotten in the copious retrospect of Homer’s glance. The resulting poem is a war memorial and a profoundly responsive work that gives new voice to Homer’s level-voiced version of the world. Through a mix of narrative and musical repetition, the sequence becomes a meditation on the loss of human life.”

First published as Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad, Faber and Faber, 2011

With an Afterword by Eavan Boland
Publisher W. W. Norton, 2012
ISBN 9780393088670
90 pages

Alice Oswald reads an extract from Memorial (video, 3 min)
Interview (Max Porter, White Review, 2014)

Reviews: Kellaway (Observer, 2011), Womack (Telegraph, 2011), Economist (2011), Logan (New York Times, 2012), Guriel (PN Review, 2012), King (Make, 2012), Stopa-Hunt (Oxonian Review, 2012), Spears (Rumpus, 2014).
Commentaries: Harrop (New Voices in Classical Reception Studies, 2013), Farrier (Environmental Humanities, 2014).

Publisher (Faber)
Publisher (Norton)
WorldCat

EPUB (updated on 2019-10-11)