2016 Literature Publications and Grants

Cole, Henri. “Land of Never-Ending Holes.” Claremont McKenna College Magazine, Spring-Summer 2016.


Cole, Henri. “My John Berryman:  A Poet of Deep Unease.” The New Yorker Page-Turner, April 6, 2016.


Cole, Henri. “Orphic Paris, Part XVI.” Essay. The New Yorker Page-Turner, August 2, 2016.


Cole, Henri. “Poeta Mirabilis.” Poetry Ireland Review, edited by Vona Groarke, Issue 117, 2016, 68-71.


Review of Seamus Heaney’s Selected Poems 1966-1987 and Selected Poems 1988-2013, Faber & Faber, 2014.


Cole, Henri. “Street of the Iron Poet, Part XVII).” The New Yorker Page-Turner, November 28, 2016.


Cole, Henri, “Swimming with Oliver Sacks.” The New Yorker Page-Turner, January 5, 2016.


Cole, Henri, “War Rug.” The New York Times Magazine, August 5, 2016.

Agamben, Giorgio. “A Jurist Confronting Himself.” Translated by Leland de La Durantaye. The Oxford Handbook to Carl Schmitt, Oxford University Press, 2016.


de la Durantaye, Leland. Essay on the philosophical and legal implications of the work of Carl Schmitt.


de la Durantaye, Leland. Beckett's Art of Mismaking. Harvard University Press, 2016.

Abstract: Readers have long responded to Samuel Beckett’s novels and plays with wonder or bafflement. They portray blind, lame, maimed creatures cracking whips and wielding can openers who are funny when they should be chilling, cruel when they should be tender, warm when most wounded. His works seem less to conclude than to stop dead. And so readers quite naturally ask: what might all this be meant to mean? In a lively and enlivening study of a singular creative nature, Leland de la Durantaye helps us better understand Beckett’s strangeness and the notorious difficulties it presents. He argues that Beckett’s lifelong campaign was to mismake on purpose—not to denigrate himself, or his audience, nor even to reconnect with the child or the savage within, but because he believed that such mismaking is in the interest of art and will shape its future. Whether called “creative willed mismaking,” “logoclasm,” or “word-storming in the name of beauty,” Beckett meant by these terms an art that attacks language and reason, unity and continuity, art and life, with wit and venom. Beckett’s Art of Mismaking explains Beckett’s views on language, the relation between work and world, and the interactions between stage and page, as well as the motives guiding his sixty-year-long career—his strange decision to adopt French as his literary language, swerve from the complex novels to the minimalist plays, determination to “fail better,” and principled refusal to follow any easy path to originality. (Text by Harvard University Press)


de la Durantaye, Leland. “The Art of Morality, or on Lolita.” Nabokov and the Question of Morality: Aesthetics, Metaphysics, and the Ethics of Fiction, edited by Michael Rodgers and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, Palgrave, 2016, 183-196.


Treatment of the relation of aesthetics to ethics in Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita and in the extensive criticism it has elicited since its publication in 1955.


de la Durantaye, Leland. “To Be and To Do. On Giorgio Agamben’s L’uso dei corpi. Homo sacer, IV, 2” The Boston Review. January-February 2016.


Treatment of Giorgio Agamben's 9-book 20-year-long Homo Sacer series.

Faggen, Robert. Mary Weatherford: The Neon Paintings. The Gould Center for Humanistic Studies of Claremont McKenna College and Delmonico Books Prestel, 2016.

Stergiopoulou, Katerina. “Review of Lena Hoff’s Nicolas Calas and the Challenge of Surrealism.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 34.1, 2016, 179-182.


Stergiopoulou, Katerina. “The Song of Songs in the Rhythms of George Seferis.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 34.2, 2016, 265-298.

Abstract: Modern Greek poet George Seferis translated the Song of Songs in 1960 (published 1965), using as his basis the Koine Greek text of the Septuagint but also gaining access to its Hebrew version by consulting other editions. Seferis’s translation is primarily motivated by a desire to expose the linguistic and textual multiplicity that constitutes the Septuagint itself. Seferis’s translation thus consistently calls attention to the Hebrew that lies behind or alongside the Septuagint’s Greek, to the complex textual status of the Bible, and to the irreducible role of translation in the shaping of literary, linguistic, and theological traditions. In so doing, it unsettles and undercuts conventional ideas about religious dogma, the essence of Greek culture, and translation.  The analysis of Seferis’s structural, grammatical, and lexical choices shows that he consistently refuses simply to absorb the Septuagint’s Greek into Modern Greek, but instead underscores difference in hopes of creating a genuinely polyphonic text that would be adequate to the Septuagint.

von Hallberg, Robert. "Michael Harper and the Music.” Journal of Ethnic American Literature 6, 2016, 8-20.