In a Trance is just the sort of genre-defying work we at Peanut and punctum and, as it happens, Jeffrey Skoblow, revel in. It is a book-length essay by a fiction writer. It is a fictional essay by a literary scholar. It is a gallant assay by a smart man who thinks while he walks, and he walks a lot.The book is a meta-meditation on Paleolithic cave drawings and the humans who ponder them. It is fact-based and entrancing just as the cave drawings are actual (existing in time - loosely - and space - more definitively) and mesmerizing. Skoblow is devising stories as "we" (humans) have always devised stories though in a less familiar mode, along a less travelled path.The essay draws on (!) the careful/thoughtful/whimsical notebooks kept by Skoblow over a dozen years. The notebooks record/illuminate/complicate his visits to twelve Paleolithic art sites as well as his deep, eccentric reading of texts concerned in some way with the subject of cave drawings by an array of scientists, anthropologists, archeologists, art historians, and other sundry enthusiasts and experts, so-called and otherwise.
Dooble Tongue' is an imaginative meditation on Robert Burns and Scottish poetry, as well as a book that engages and contests the customary assumptions and practices of literary criticism. Beginning with an examination of two contemporary Scottish poets, W.N. Herbert and Robert Crawford, and moving back in time to the Scottish Modernist master Hugh MacDiarmid, then further back to Burns himself, the study of the Scottish tradition is situated in a broad historical context. The focus throughout is on language (particularly Scots), more broadly vernacular literature in relation to culturally elite literary and critical modes- as well as on questions of literary nationalism and the cultural politics of poetic discourse.
Paradise Dislocated offers a radical rereading of William Morris's neglected masterpiece, The Earthly Paradise. While most critics have seen this poem as the antithesis of the radical socialist politics that Morris embraced later in his career, or, at best, as an awkward prelude to that later development, Jeffrey Skoblow proposes that The Earthly Paradise is in fact central to Morris's political vision-indeed, it is the most radical manifestation of that vision. Paradise Dislocated explores the problematic relations between critical thought, art, utopian aspirations, and dystopian realities. It proposes a revaluation of Morris's poem and of his career as a whole, as well as a judgement upon the possibilities (and impossibilities) of imaginative and cultural criticism at Morris's moment-and at our own.
Dooble Tongue' is an imaginative meditation on Robert Burns and Scottish poetry, as well as a book that engages and contests the customary assumptions and practices of literary criticism. Beginning with an examination of two contemporary Scottish poets, W.N. Herbert and Robert Crawford, and moving back in time to the Scottish Modernist master Hugh MacDiarmid, then further back to Burns himself, the study of the Scottish tradition is situated in a broad historical context. The focus throughout is on language (particularly Scots), more broadly vernacular literature in relation to culturally elite literary and critical modes- as well as on questions of literary nationalism and the cultural politics of poetic discourse.
In a Trance is just the sort of genre-defying work we at Peanut and punctum and, as it happens, Jeffrey Skoblow, revel in. It is a book-length essay by a fiction writer. It is a fictional essay by a literary scholar. It is a gallant assay by a smart man who thinks while he walks, and he walks a lot.The book is a meta-meditation on Paleolithic cave drawings and the humans who ponder them. It is fact-based and entrancing just as the cave drawings are actual (existing in time - loosely - and space - more definitively) and mesmerizing. Skoblow is devising stories as "we" (humans) have always devised stories though in a less familiar mode, along a less travelled path.The essay draws on (!) the careful/thoughtful/whimsical notebooks kept by Skoblow over a dozen years. The notebooks record/illuminate/complicate his visits to twelve Paleolithic art sites as well as his deep, eccentric reading of texts concerned in some way with the subject of cave drawings by an array of scientists, anthropologists, archeologists, art historians, and other sundry enthusiasts and experts, so-called and otherwise.
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