William T. Vollmann

A Critical Companion

Christopher K. Coffman, Daniel Lukes

• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781611495119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

"This fascinating, massive, wide-ranging collection that editors Christopher K. Coffman and Daniel Lukes have gathered together into William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion will soon be recognized as one of those rare critical books for which that egregiously overused term 'groundbreaking' is fully justified." —Larry McCaffery, from the preface of William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion

The essays in this collection make a case for regarding William T. Vollmann as the most ambitious, productive, and important living author in the US. His oeuvre includes not only outstanding work in numerous literary genres, but also global reportage, ethical treatises, paintings, photographs, and many other productions. His reputation as a daring traveler and his fascination with life on the margins have earned him an extra-literary renown unequaled in our time. Perhaps most importantly, his work is exceptional in relation to the literary moment. Vollmann is a member of a group of authors who are responding to the skeptical ironies of postmodernism with a reinvigoration of fiction's affective possibilities and moral sensibilities, but he stands out even among this cohort for his prioritization of moral engagement, historical awareness, and geopolitical scope. Included in this book in addition to twelve scholarly critical essays are reflections on Vollmann by many of his peers, confidantes, and collaborators, including Jonathan Franzen, James Franco, and Michael Glawogger. With a preface by Larry McCaffery and an afterword by Michael Hemmingson, this book offers readings of most of Vollmann's works, includes the first critical engagements with several key titles, and introduces a range of voices from international Vollmann scholarship.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction: Lonely Atoms
• Engaging People, Space, and Place
• Egalitarian Longings: The Problem with Pity and the Search for Equality in Poor People
• The World According to William T. Vollmann
• The Poetics and Politics of Zoning, Mythography, and Mestizo Space in Imperial
• Vollmann in Russia: On Poor People
• William T. Vollmann’s Search for Truth and Community in Participative Research
• Palm Trees
• Engaging Narratives:History, Historiography, Ethics
• Vollmann’s Argall -Text: Neo-Elizabethan Form and the Literalist Past in Seven Dreams
• Vollmann between the Covers
• Writing Europe: Death, History, and the Intersecting Intellectual Worlds of William T. Vollmann and Danilo Kiš
• Kurt Gerstein and the Tragic Parable of “Clean Hands”
• Reading Rising Up and Rising Down
• The New Universalism and William T. Vollmann’s Rising Up and Rising Down
• Power, Sex, Politics
• Our Oriental Heritage: Seeking the Postcolonial Postmodern in William T. Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels
• Piss Lime Vitriol
• William T. Vollmann’s Paradigms of Power
• The Shattered Object
• “Strange Hungers”: William T. Vollmann’s Literary Performances of Abject Masculinity
• A Friendship
• Methods and Mores: Texts, Paratexts, Aesthetics
• William T. Vollmann
• Imperial Photography
• Against All Loss
• The Ethics of the Archive and the William T. Vollmann Collection
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Contributors